It was difficult to coordinate release schedules with the CIA but we got there in the end

This week we discuss the CIA and the art world with Frances Stonor Saunders, author of the canonical book in this field "Who Paid The Piper?".

Big thanks to the HKW for facilitating this discussion, and be sure to check out the other programming from their "Disappearance of Music" event.

In this episode we welcome Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, significant player in the platform co-operativism movement and the originator of the term “exit to community”

We discuss the state of platform co-operativism today, the intersections between more traditional coop communities and the emerging crypto world, the history of co-ops, and as usual we get to gleefully dunk on the mythologies of the centralised platform economy.

Hi everyone,

happy to share with you a conversation this week with The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, whose petition making demands of Spotify to improve terms for artists has gathered over 20,000 signatures and counting.

We discuss those demands in detail, other initiatives they have undertaken and take the rare opportunity to have a conversation about living under streaming with other actively touring musicians .

We join Sarah Friend, core dev from talk of the town project Circles UBI to discuss the crazy few weeks they have been having giving away a UBI through social trust networks. We pull apart how the project works and discuss the history of local currencies, potential dystopian scenarios, "weird fatigue" and  the turbulence of pursuing an art practice that involves building things that do stuff.

We went on a recording frenzy this past week so have a bunch more great episodes lined up. Hope you are all good!

This week we welcome Dee and Jacob from Zora, a new organisation that is building tools for artists to issue tokens around their creative practices.

We discuss their idea of dynamic pricing of art releases and at the advent of the musician RAC releasing his $RAC token through ZORA, the new space of artists and their audiences owning a stake in the value they interdependently create in the world. We also talk a tour around the very short history of artist token models, how these new tools are enabling financial literacy, what not to do, and what other potential models could emerge from this nascent era of collectively owned cultural institutions

Back with a conversation with a special person and close friend of the podcast Jay Springett

Jay is a writer, theorist and podcaster who falls into a special category of people where we can say with some confidence that whatever they are thinking about will be commonplace in a few years. We discuss a passion of his, Solarpunk, cultural fracking, universe construction, permaculture, Russia’s real jurassic park, K pop and the factory model, reality modelling and aerospace, conspiracy theories and much more.

Can’t recommend enough that you check out Jay’s various cultural contributions, and hope you are all having a wonderful week.