Mat Dryhurst joins George, Carly and Dan this week to answer all sorts of important questions. Is New Zealand the best place to live? Are we living in a sim? Is post-modernism the metaverse? They also talk about the future of Web 3.0, the major flaw of pay-per-stream models, and the similarities between NFTs, the music industry, the art world, venture capitalists, and sex work.
Show Notes
- Which Tech Bro Is Fleeing Coronavirus On This ‘Lord Of The Rings’ Plane?
- New Zealand Approves Paid Leave After A Miscarriage
- British family to be deported after outraging New Zealanders with alleged spree of bad behavior
- RIP ascribe, NFTs before NFTs were a thing
- Check out artist and curator Rosa Menkman’s work
- There are a lot of energy consumption concerns around crypto -- and rightly so -- but could it also be part of the solution? Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future
- Oh thank god, they preserved the original Space Jam website
- Rent Ari Folman’s The Congress on Amazon
- Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50
- What is a DAO?
- Why Does London Have Two Mayors?
- Interdependence, a podcast hosted by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
- 4AD Label
- How many people does it take to write a hit song?
- The Other Internet’s Headless Brands concept
- Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get first access to George’s “The Song that Owns Itself” whitepaper
- Lips, a new rival to Instagram that is actually body positive
- Sex Workers Pioneered the Early Internet—and It Screwed Them Over
- A new law intended to curb sex trafficking threatens the future of the internet as we know it
- Join Carly by joining Women of SexTech Cyber Society
Three Things
Mat
- Loving: That the state of Wyoming passes ‘DAO law’, which recognizes decentralized autonomous organizations as LLCs, serving as a bridge between on- and off-chain assets
- Building: With Polygon, a framework for building interconnected blockchain networks where developers can launch preset blockchain networks with attributes tailored to their needs. Mat minted and transacted 10 million tokens for less than $5
- Composing: With OpenAI’s music tools, like Jukebox, a neural network that generates music
Dan
- Loving: Chris Enswell Jones’ tweets. For the past year, every Friday he’s told touching and funny stories from his life through threads
- Reflecting: On Ellen Cushing’s article in The Atlantic, Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain. The pandemic has either left us with more time than ever or less time than ever and this piece brought Dan to reflect on his experience from the past year
- Playing: With the Oculus Quest 2 VR headset
Carly
- Reading: Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, a piece of non-fiction that covers the sexual and emotional lives of three different women from three different parts of the US. It took Taddeo eight years of embedding herself in the lives of these women to write the book
- Donating: To Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers. If you’re looking for a place to donate some money to support the Asian-American community, this a great organization to check out
- Listening: To The Opportunist podcast, a show that “tells true stories of regular people who turn sinister simply by being opportunistic.” Up first: the wild story of Sherry Shriner
George
- Listening: To Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee. A sad, beautiful album with incredible melodies
- Listening pt 2: To Ignorance by The Weather Station. Very different from Waxahatchee but equally great. George has been obsessed with the quality of production of the album
- Quoting: Qwest TV, “To untrained ears, Thelonious Monk’s music sounded chaotic and crude by comparison. He played music the way life felt, complex, unresolved, tragicomic, ungraspable, beautiful. It was music designed to remind the listener of how everything wasn’t okay, especially not for African-Americans.”
