A short walk from the main drag, there was a secluded glen area called Envelop, where you could relax in a blow-up cushion while listening to an ambient set, meditating or sipping mushroom tea. But the true centrepiece of the campus was where the live performances were set up – a beautiful, grassy amphitheatre with enormous, floating canopies hanging overhead, which resembled pulsating jellyfish in the daytime and the underside of giant mushroom caps at night.
Throughout the festival, there was an almost cult-like excitement about the talks. The participants all espoused the benefits that Web3 could lead to in creative industries. It felt like an attractive premise. Who wouldn’t be enticed by an equitable, creator-focused utopia, where musicians would have more than enough money to make a living from their art, and no longer need to pander to predatory record labels or streaming platforms?
“For better or for worse, it feels like our generation has the opportunity to build things within our cultural spaces I think previously had to be built at scale,” said David Rudnick, a graphic designer and Web3 optimist with a presence in leftfield electronic music circles. “Things like Spotify would come in and shake 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 disseminated and how an artist made money, whereas now you’re seeing people propose ideas of what alternatives could be like.”
I thought about the potential downsides – the environmental impact of cryptocurrency, the financial inaccessibility of the sector writ large, and the inherent exclusivity of any club with a multi-hundred dollar price tag. However, after Saturday afternoon’s Dissent by Design keynote with Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap (a decentralised marketplace for trading cryptocurrency on the Ethereum blockchain), I found myself becoming slightly less sceptical and slightly more pilled. If we table those valid concerns for a moment, is crypto’s reputation one of poor PR? Can collective, democratised 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 type of artist, is how we get to own our art pieces, 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 her set. “[Also,] in traditional Web 2.0 social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter, you can be kicked out at any given point and their rules are not transparent… [because] it’s advertisement-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 nobody will ever take it away from me.”