FWB Fest proved that blockchain doesn’t have to be…
A short walk from the main street was a secluded area called Envelop, where you could relax in an inflated pillow while listening to an ambient set, meditating or sipping mushroom tea. But the true centerpiece of the campus was where the live performances were staged – a beautiful, grassy amphitheater with huge floating canopies hanging overhead, resembling pulsating jellyfish by day and the undersides of giant mushroom caps by night.
Throughout the festival there was an almost cult-like excitement over the talks. The participants all advocated the benefits that Web3 can bring to creative industries. It felt like an attractive premise. Who wouldn’t be enticed by a fair, creator-focused utopia, where musicians would have more than enough money to make a living from their art, and would no longer have to turn to predatory record labels or streaming platforms?
“For better or worse, it feels like our generation has the ability to build things within our cultural spaces that I think used to have to be built on a grand scale, said David Rudnick, a graphic designer and Web3 optimist with a presence in left-wing electronic music circles. . ?“Things like Spotify would come in and shake things up [things] without our permission and without any desire on our part to see things shaken up. It would disrupt and change the model of how music was distributed and how an artist made money, whereas now you see people proposing ideas of what alternatives could be.”
I thought about the potential downsides – the environmental impact of cryptocurrency, the financial inaccessibility of the large sector, and the inherent exclusivity of any club with a multi-hundred dollar price tag. After Saturday afternoon’s Dissent by Design keynote with Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap (a decentralized cryptocurrency trading marketplace on the Ethereum blockchain), I found myself becoming a little less skeptical and a little more pilled. Putting these valid concerns aside for a moment, is crypto’s reputation one of bad PR? Can collective, democratized ownership be achieved through crypto in practice? Tolokonnikova’s take on the subject, from the point of view of a conceptual artist and activist, was particularly compelling.
“What’s exciting for a musician or any kind of artist is how we come to own our artwork, and we don’t necessarily have to [go through] a record label or a gallery if we want to get funding,” she explained to me before the set. “[Also,] in traditional Web 2.0 social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter, you can be kicked out at any time and their rules are not transparent… [because] it’s advertising driven and they don’t want anything unpleasant to appear. I’m excited about Web3 because I can own this piece of digital land, or this piece of social network, and know that no one will ever take it away from me.”
