Introducing Recurrent Labs and the Common Protocol









Recurrent Labs by Currents.fm is building a protocol for decentralized, Artist-owned culture distribution networks on the blockchain.













Contents:

— An Example

— A Question

— A Framework

— A Model

— A Future













Words are imprecise; emotions are real. Everything I've written here, you may already understand. If so, welcome back  💙





— An Example —



It's a simple, common occurrence: you discover a track, algorithmically suggested on the internet. Imagine that instead, a close friend sends you that same track, saying: “This is my favorite track. I’ve been listening to it for years.”



Nothing about the content changed. But in one case, your personal valuation of it may be many times greater. 



From where I come from, I see this as a small example culture being created.



Regardless of how it's owned, how we connect over content – in a word, Distribution – is what breathes value into the content. That value is a phenomenon that lives between us as Culture. 







— A Question —



With all that is happening in Web3, it's easy to get lost in the noise. It's being developed as we speak; i.e. "Crypto" is not supposed to make sense yet, even to "crypto people". It's even easier to forget that tech may be powerful, but tech is never a panacea in and of itself.



So how do you know what's real? Same as always – the people who build it and the people who use it. Trustless is a myth. Web3 and NFTs are interesting but...well...you know.



We can talk about technology all day, but in the end – just like everything else in this imperfect, imperfect world – the people (and the communities we form together) are the beginning and the end. 



New Web3 systems allow for more open and equitable vehicles of Value, Ownership, Governance, Transaction, and Storage. It's early. We're still figuring things out, like environmental issues, transparency vs. privacy, usability and accessibility, and a lot more. But it will get there with time.



But crucially, Ownership and Value can only go so far without Distribution. Intuitively, it's the ways that we connect (and connect, and connect, and connect recursively outwards) that enable Culture to emerge – read on for context. That connection is owned and taxed heavily: every level of Distribution is still closed. It's the elephant in the room.



If Art is inseparable from the Artist, why does our system of Ownership in the Land of Ideas look suspiciously like the flawed systems of Ownership in the Land of the Land? And why do we never talk about how our systems that transact said Ownership are expressly optimized for taking the Art and separating (both Value and Control of) it from the Artist?



















— A Framework —



Who gets to choose what’s fair?

Who gets to choose how content is seen?

Who defined how creative value is allowed to be recognized?

Who defined how popularity is allowed to be expressed?



In the current state of cultural industries, every interaction, transaction or recognition of value passes through the tollbooth of the gatekeeper platforms that own our connections. That toll is paid in many ways: in attention, in time, and of course, in Capital. Somehow, the irreproducible (read: nonfungible) connections that form in between us have completely slipped into the control of the layers of corporations that hold the keys to Distribution. From a historical context, this is expected – when access to each other was difficult before the modern internet, Distribution was the barrier. The most efficient solution to Distribution came through economies of scale.



Times have changed since then. Mobile internet has spread into every corner of the world. The rent seekers are clinging on to their rapidly obsolete walled gardens and the standardized systems that enable them.



The dams blocking access to each other have blown open. And the Currents that lay behind them have been building for a long, long time.









Community is defined by the connections between us, and Culture is defined by how they wax and wane. Is it any surprise that when every level of Distribution is owned by faceless corporations, when the Connection that allows Culture to flow is held captive behind walled gardens, that the Artists and Collectives at the source see a tenth of the value that they bring to our lives?



Something top-down perspectives of either music or tech will never understand: Bottom-up distribution not only exists, but has always been the true force that top-down distribution models are powered by. As Culture is created by the grassroots, the solution to Culture will come from the grassroots.













— A Model —



If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.



Until now, the only tools in the collective Matrix simulation that we call the “economy” are based on the commodity model: standardized economic boxes, that are exchanged in two-party transactions, that undergo price discovery, allow for liquidity, and service the standardization of value and transaction.



This model established a vehicle in which a good or service can be efficiently traded between two parties. That good or service is assumed to have some globally "correct" value, and the transaction itself is zero-sum. The Monte-Carlo simulation of an exchange allows for the assumed "correct" value to be found. Our boxes are inherently designed for fungibility.



In cultural industries, these boxes include Tracks/Albums ($1 for a download, etc), Streams (~$0.0035 for a play), Royalty Contracts, Distribution Contracts, CDs/Vinyl, Merch, Features, Show Tickets, and so forth. These are all reflections – some projection or artifact – a good or service that serves as a token reminder of something greater.



That greater thing is Culture. The reflections are not the ground truth. By not embracing this, we allow them to be gamed, value itself distorted.









This part has always intuitively been known by Artist communities: The form of Culture is only invisible if you divide us and standardize us individually. Missing the forest for the trees (how much suffering could have been avoided if only technologists asked a question every now and then?).



At the community level, the Currents that form Culture have always been there. They've just become invisible (invisibly owned), overshadowed by the monolith of centralized Distribution.



Our individual streams of connection form Currents that naturally emerge when we meet, interact, recognize, and amplify each other as a community – Currents that infinitely, Recursively refract when we connect with each other and over Content. Together, these recursive connections form the rivers between us through which this fluid of collective Identity that we call Culture flows.



This is fundamental: Distribution controls Connection, and Connection creates (cultural) Value. Thus, in the context of Ownership, Distribution is what gives Ownership value.



Culture is continuous, not discrete. We‘re forging a path deeper into the future of Web3 – a future that goes past Ownership, for we need the tools and models for decentralized Distribution to address the root of the problem.





— A Future —



Culture is not a commodity; it is a fundamentally networked phenomenon.



For the last year and a half, we have been researching and developing a decentralized protocol for broad distribution – expressing Culture via what we naturally form together: Organic, shifting, bottom-up Artist-owned networks that have always existed across our communities.



Our communities may seem small individually: these networks of People who have been drawn, quartered, traumatized, turned against each other, taxed, and colonized, without consent, by each the faceless corporations that own the layers of distribution. By everyone who is not us.



But together, our communities span the worldwide grassroots. The project, previously centralized, has supported music scenes driven by Artists and Collectives in more than a hundred countries. Since day zero, we have pledged 100% of income directly to Artists and Collectives. We will continue to do so until Covid is over, so that the open protocol behind the project can develop a life of its own.



Our team are almost all Artists ourselves. Artist/Engineer. Artist/Designer. Artist/Operations. Artist/ ____. We're majority qt/bipoc, fully distributed across five continents, and hail from the grassroots scenes around the world that we serve. We work for you, we build for you, we have and will travel to meet you in your communities – our communities – wherever you are in this imperfect, imperfect world.



Protocols are languages as well, and we choose a language defined not by trustlessness, arbitrage, or extraction – for that is the lens of the privileged – but one defined by trust, collaboration, and kindness.



We refuse to be further devalued and further colonized by the centralized monoliths that own the rivers through which our unalienable connection flows.



We are building rivers that organically flow wherever our communities are.





✦





The Currents project has four pieces:

• Recurrent Labs - Our core team

• Currents.fm - the experimental website and community space,

• the open-source Common Protocol,

• and [TBA ;)]



We will be announcing a bit of funding soon in a press release, but I wanted to let you all know first: Currents is a community-first project.



We've only taken money from folks who I trust & am inspired by with all my heart – with a track record of heavy lifting in service of the same (nascent, fragile, but growing) dream of an open, Artist-first, grassroots-owned, decentralized and vibrantly music-filled future.





We are all Music.

Thank you for being here. 

Join us (we're hiring!)





💙



≅ 𝇉 × ⨎ ∞