Joe.Blog

A small, good, free thing that we’re cooking up for you with a bunch of local musical legends.

Celebrating independent community spaces in Sydney.

October 28. 2-6pm. Free

"the soundtrack to our life in lockdown and isolation, march 2020 - december 2021 something for everyone. the sound of headspace and discovery, sometimes both at once."

Listen to it on Mixcloud

Track List:

1. Not Waving - Hold On

2. Daniel Avery & Alessandro Cortini - Illusion Of Time

3. The Avalanches - Until Daylight Comes

4. 1300 - Smashmouth

5. Pino Palladino - Ekuté

6. 070 Shake - Body

7. Moody Beach - Plastic Love

8. The Chemical Brothers - Work Energy Principle

9. Lady Gaga - Rain On Me [ft. Ariana Grande]

10. Letta Mbulu - Kilimanjaro Take Us Higher

11. Barker - Bent

12. Magdalena Bay - Chaeri

13. Joy Orbison - better

14. Doja Cat - Need to Know

15. Sydney Yungins - Rowdy

16. Leon Vynehall - Mothra

17. Berta Kennedy - Free-Swimming

18. Soul Glo - Gold Chain Punk (whogonbeatmyass?)

19. Turnstile - MYSTERY

20. Clipping - Tipsy (J-Kwon Cover)

21. Triple One - BLOOD RAVE

22. Cassandra Jenkins - Hard Drive

23. Mykki Blanco - Trust A Little Bit (God Colony Version)

24. The 1975 - Frail State of Mind

25. Good Morning - Country

26. Julie Byrne - Love's Refrain

27. Shabason, Krgovich & Harris - Osouji

I quit all Meta Platform Inc. (formerly Facebook Inc.) products about eight months ago.

It was part experiment, part protest in response to a company that has a long history of overreach without much consequence. This has been exposed to greater and greater degrees as Facebook have increasingly shrugged off their direct accountability for how their products and the ways they are designed impact people.

And yet, you quit the platforms and you feel the impact they have on our lives!

My time spent Off Platform has been interesting, and it’s helped me to reflect on - and hopefully understand better - how people connect with each other and what we depend on in order to make those connections. Going cold turkey was challenging - it ripped out a massive hole in my connection to the world around me, and it made me realise how weak we are as a society now without these platforms at the centre of what we do. For a lot of people I dropped off the planet.

Too many of our connections between people depend on a limited number of platforms with too much control.

More than ever I’m concerned by how much connections between people and communities seem to have become wholly dependent on a limited number of platforms, all owned by massively wealthy and influential companies. It seems difficult to overstate these companies’ direct influence over how people perceive the world around them. This has been covered at length, and has been debated hotly ever since social media started switching from chronological to algorithmic feeds.

What’s really interesting is that this trend of dependence on massive companies isn’t just restricted to social media, or how we communicate: it’s a reflection of the broader world around us and how we function economically. It’s been super interesting watching the way in which modern economies have continued to escalate their obsession with scale: the quest for the greatest possible amount of sustained growth.

Everything is a vehicle for scale these days. Any business or project that doesn’t scale will be crushed.

Everything about a company’s valuation - it’s estimated worth - these days is all about its opportunity for scale, because scale is the opportunity to get the greatest returns from the most operationally efficient mechanism. That’s why venture capital (VC) is obsessed with it: they make bets on businesses that are losing money in the hope that they can crack a formula that will help them fail.

Unfortunately - and this is the central point of this piece: actions motivated by scale are all too often at the expense of humanity’s best interests. It’s a cold, clinical desire to get as big as possible, to have the largest user base, the greatest growth trajectory, etc.

I fear that scale works against the principles of community, and community is the lifeblood of civilisation. In other words: the weaker our community networks are, the weaker our bonds with our fellow people.

We’ve never had it so good.

We have so much aimless time. It’s insane to think about the conveniences that are available to us, the amount of downtime that we have that companies are waiting in the wings to pounce on to dazzle us with advertiser impressions or take our subscription fees. That’s aided by convenience: we’ve never had it be so easy to live. Our floors clean themselves, our dishes wash themselves, our laundry washes itself. Our food or online purchases arrive on our doorsteps effortlessly, eliminating any appreciation for the labour that went into acquiring it.

Our life expectancy is longer than ever before. We have more time than ever for leisure - but what do we fill our time with? We have Netflix competing with sleep for minutes. We have social media companies that are measuring the success of their platform via minutes or interactions spent per session. Doesn’t matter whether any of that time is meaningful - just time spent, so they can feed more ads or stave off subscriber churn.

So what are we investing in to strengthen connections between individuals? We see that people have less and less extracurricular activities beyond food and drink (mostly drink). Faith-based communities are shrinking and don’t engender the trust they used to (for good reasons). Opinion pieces are written on the ethics of workplace relationships, with many arguing that they’re necessary because people have increasingly fewer places to meet people.

When I talk about the fabric of community I’m talking about everything from the connections we have with the people in our street, the connections that we have with the people that we share common interests with (DIY music or model airplanes), the people we might have nothing in common with that we nonetheless share a society with, and the people around us that need to be looked after.

Instead, everything has been outsourced for some kind of elegant solution with a neat financial model. Everything a person needs is someone else’s problem - something to build a company around. So much of the ugly details of survival are conveniently attached to some kind of price, and our individual responsibility is lessened. In areas of particular interest to us, we might take the step to be further directly engaged by donating to a not-for-profit organisation/charity, but unless we’re actively involved in some way it’s all someone else’s problem. And then it becomes the charity’s responsibility to effective market to ensure it can continue to attract dollars.

And when it comes to the things that make our lives and localities more vibrant, more exciting, more meaningful - I’m really passionate about live music, for example - it’s so easy to assume that an industry is going to provide us with everything that will scratch that itch for a connection to culture that we assume lies underneath the surface.

Conversations are more fraught than ever. Having a conversation is less an exchange of ideas and more an art in getting engagement through punchy impact, even if loses nuance in the process (I’ve made a great decision writing 1,606 words to get my point across then).

When social media first started to mature, I was incredibly excited, especially when Twitter arrived. It was amazing to see a way in which connections could be made that were previously not possible: conversations were happening between people that have never been had before, in a way that seemed more authentic and opportunity-rich than anything I’d seen before. What we saw with a platform like Twitter in its early days is an environment that fostered little microcommunities, and allowed for discovery of the people that were advocates for those microcommunities. It was such an exciting time: speaking personally, I discovered so much of Sydney‘s music community through the early days of Twitter, and built friendships that have lasted upwards of a decade. I first met my now-partner on Twitter.

Yesterday my partner and I were reflecting on whether our friendship would’ve been able to develop if we had both joined Twitter today, and I think in some respects it’s less likely but not impossible. Twitter is an animal that is all about scale now, and the horse bolted along time ago when they started prioritising user growth rather than quality of engagement.

Now, it’s all just yelling into the void - exemplified by the “pick a side and scream about it” discourse of Gamergate, US political discourse, and more recently the polarity of opinions on pandemic response. We haven’t done well at understanding the motivations or concerns of people with different opinions. We just shout louder.

So I want to introduce the idea of scale being the enemy of true “value” in a human sense. I believe that scale can definitely create financial value, it certainly has a dramatic affect on the valuation of companies, but it’s quite clear to me that scale as a vehicle for growth is the enemy of true, deep human connections that help people to have a greater appreciation for the world around them and to explore, learn, and feel a greater connection to taking individual responsibility for their part to play in the world around them.

The good shit has gone underground

There are good communities thriving, but they’re walled away in dark, invite-only group chats, Slack workspaces and Discords. This makes discoverability difficult, but the quality is high because the engagement is strong and the limited number of individuals (and lack of engagement being a driver for content visibility) means the human values are stronger.

What are you going to do about it?

Principles for good community building could include:

• Enable hubs that can self-propagate

  • Theory: if something’s getting popular, it can be split into further niche communities

  • Enable discoverability

    . Make it possibly for people to find stuff that isn’t motivated by fads (burger joints) or advertising dollars (industry).

   

  that keep spheres of interaction small and “knowable”. Don’t focus on growth, focus on substance.

• Find a way to map microcommunities

  . People should be able to direct their own discovery - enter via one sphere of interest and then navigate across different vertices.

Where to begin?

• Start a hub

  • A hub should have curatorial emphasis and direct people to meet physically rather than online conversation

  • Online conversation might be a supporting mechanism but not a primary one.

  . Promote. Find a model that limits the scalability.

So what's that look like?

The journey is beginning at SydneyMusic.net. We've intentionally started small, but we have a two year journey in mind that we're going to keep using to explore, learn and refine our thinking.

I’m tired of nightlife getting media attention because of its economic value.

It has intrinsic value because of the connections it creates between people, independent of whether it makes money.

So…

❌ Stop giving it airtime just because of how many x billions of dollars it might create.

✅ Start giving it airtime because culture is how we strengthen and give voice to communities.

Get your values right. Money is a second order priority.

We're on the cusp of a REALLY EXCITING time in Sydney's artistic community. We need to get it right.

We need musicians + artists giving a voice to our times, and that won't truly happen if it's only driven by an industry: it needs to be a natural expression of the community itself.

Nothing against the music or arts industries. I know they're an important part of the ecosystem - but people make the mistake of seeing the music industry and our music communities as a Venn diagram containing two completely overlapping circles - that they're one and the same.

In Venn diagram terms, the music industry is a small circle in within a gigantic circle representing a dizzying number of musical communities/subcultures. That perspective is important, otherwise we're not going to have a proper view of the incredible breadth and depth around us.

Also, the music industry will be more exciting if it recognises itself as secondary and allows / encourages the grassroots stuff to thrive.

And I see green shoots that suggest that that is beginning to happen, and that makes me unbelievably happy.

Once again, I apologise. Despite my best intentions to get content into this blog at a proper rate again, there have been numerous distractions coming from nearly all directions. Just wanted to give an update on what one of these directions is.

Since we’ve moved out to Ryde (land of the musical black hole), we’ve wanted to see what we can do to encourage a bit of activity in music around here. As we seemed to have landed on our feet in moving into a house seemingly purpose-built for hosting gigs, the first step for doing so seemed pretty obvious. So for the last few months we’ve been working out how we can approach this, and out of all of that The Gate was born.

We did a test gig a couple of nights ago to see how viable the idea is and I’m am utterly thrilled to say that the gig went incredibly well, to the point where we’re more than eager to develop the environment as a venue to host a semi-regular event.

For the first gig we got some friends of mine – Garage Hymnal – to do a show for their fans. Telafonica (who I’ve raved about before) graciously accepted an invitation to play a support set.

Anyway, I just wanted to drop a post about what we’re doing as a heads-up on what will likely be happening in the near future. Ideally, each event will be an opportunity to feature up and coming artists and bands from Sydney and beyond in an area that doesn’t ever get to see them. On top of that, we think we’ve landed a space that’s a unique and exciting place to see music, and definitely one of interest to people beyond this area.

The backyard is a 150 capacity space (deck and yard) with a naturally landscaped raised level in the yard that functions as a stage.

All events will be non-profit, with all proceeds from door donations and coffee (after costs) going to the bands.

Anyway, we’ll see how things go! Look out for an announcement over the next few days for a gig on June 19th.

Thanks to Jatin Valabjee for the photos.