(excerpt) alpha stage research on Distributed Distro
Distributed Distribution: The Sharing Crisis and How We Must Solve It
The current means by which digital multimedia are distributed (legitimately) online are diverse and convoluted. These systems, ranging from the iTunes Store to Google Images to Netflix, are responsible for an exponential growth in both audiences and the libraries to which they have access. Though this boom in accessibility should merit a proportional growth in wealth for artists and creators, it is simply not the case. These existing models have inherited many of the flaws of previous “analog” distribution systems, often accentuating, rather than remedying their worst qualities.
The problems with online media distribution are abundant; disproportionate revenue shares between corporations and creatives, undercompensated mega artists, rampant piracy, garbled metadata, a half dozen equally-confusing options for streaming media… the list goes on.
While this crisis pertains to all forms of media, ranging from music to videogames, I, as a filmmaker, am specifically interested in dissecting and remedying it in relation to movies. However, it would be unwise and regrettable to approach this issue from this perspective exclusively as the problem is orthogonal and multifaceted; this is a shared crisis. I posit that the issues at hand are as existential and ideological as they are logistical, and because of this cannot be resolved in a compartmentalized manner. I will refer to these issues collectively as the distribution crisis. Severe disruptions in both the thinking of the public and the design of the systems at play are necessary to its resolution.
With the emergence of new technologies, specifically decentralized networks and cryptocurrencies, several alternative models for online media distribution become possible. The goal of this writing is to A) determine the precise origins of flaws in existing distribution systems B) determine the established and emergent technologies necessary for a new model C) describe in detail an ideal alternative distribution model and several derivatives of this proposition D) posit the methods and techniques necessary for the adoption of such a model E) predict the next order effects of the large scale implementation of such a system.
This writing is a research paper, a speculative design brief, and more prosaically a introductory exploration into an ideal future for artists. The ideas within refer to a multidisciplinary array of subjects, focusing especially on economics, software studies, and design philosophy. I am not nor do I claim to be a scholar of any of these topics. I am personally motivated to explore these subjects in relation to the distribution crisis, as I am affected as both an artist and audience member. Existentially, I believe the media distribution crisis is a microcosm of many of the larger issues facing our species today and some of the ideas presented herein can and have been adapted for and from other realms of speculative design.
Most of my research is derived from publicly accessible online data, direct observations of existing systems, and “whitepapers” for emergent technologies. In addition, philosopher Benjamin Bratton’s “The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty” has inspired much of the systems and software thinking herein, specifically in regards to the relationship and division between user, interface, and address layers in proposed systems. I have also included a healthy amount of personal intuition and occasional conjecture.
At the core of all issues within the distribution crisis is the quality of centralization; an impractical design flaw inherited from archaic systems, dating back to the genesis of mass media. Previously, when media of any form was produced, whether it be a newspaper, vinyl record, or VHS tape, it was birthed at a central point, (usually a factory or printing press), and disseminated from there. Retail distributors of said media kept a portion of profits and the remainder kicked up to a management corporation, who paid both the manufacturer and a small or infinitesimal commission to the creator of said media.
This model, however disproportionate, was vital in the establishment of the mass media world we know today. Making a movie/album/book was a difficult process, but a much larger share of heavy machinery and coordination was necessary to share it on a large scale. With the internet, this is no longer the case. No tape, cellophane, or paper is necessary to move a piece of work from creator to audience. Just broadband. But we’re still using the old model, wherein a studio, label, publisher, or large corporation takes a huge chunk of artist’s profits. Today, media marketplaces and platforms chomp the biggest revenue share from creators. Spotify, the iTunes Store, Netflix, and YouTube have all grown exorbitantly wealthy on other people’s content.
The reason for this is a primary strength of centralized distribution models: their databases. An online media distribution system, whether it be a marketplace or streaming platform, controls and maintains the identity, distribution, and monetization of an artist and their work. These databases are massive, containing thousands, if not millions of songs and movies and other media, meticulously organized, indexed, and maintained. These centralized databases are why the common consumer subscribes to streaming media models. For a small fee, we are given access to a massive and orderly library of content, hopefully filtered through an intuitive user interface.
Though these databases are ripe with appeal and advantages, their centralization is extremely troublesome. They are data silos, completely compartmentalized from one another. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video may share an overlap of hundreds of thousands of films and shows, but their libraries are completely separate. Due to this compartmentalization, it is possible for the same piece of media to exist on a plethora of platforms, but the information and context surrounding them to be fragmented and isolated. An artist may be paid in five different ways on five different platforms, all of which severely undercompensate them. Their work may appear under five different names, in five different formats, with five unique audiences. The velocity their work receives on one platform may not transfer well to another platform, and when it does, it may not carry the identity and data necessary for proper attribution to the artist.
Let’s follow an all-too-common lifepath of a viral song. Artist A uploads Song B to Soundcloud, in hopes of promoting album sales on Bandcamp or iTunes. YouTuber C discovers Song B and shares it to his subscribers via a YouTube upload. Song B collects millions of views on YouTube, with no connection to the artist. Artist A discovers this upload and asks Youtuber C to link the video back to Artist A’s Social Media. A small percentage of clickthroughs lead to tens of thousand of new followers on Artist A’s Social Media. Some of these true fans purchase Artist A’s album on Bandcamp, wherein Artist A receives 70% of the profit, but most find the album on Spotify, resulting in hundreds of thousands of streams, for which Artist A receives less than one hundred dollars. Literally. Analogues of this phenomenon can be observed in the distribution of movies, television, and images, alike. Popularity seldom results in compensation.
What is worst about all of this is that data shows that consumers want to pay for their media. When it is intuitive, audiences will gladly pay up. [TK] Napster all but disappeared when the iTunes Store made it possible to purchase single songs for a dollar. When bittorrents emerged, making it easy to download entire albums and movies, distributors created the subscription streaming model, and millions of users hopped on. But these same users have become increasingly disheartened and alienated by these platforms. Serious fans would rather purchase physical merchandise or download media directly from its creator through mediums like Bandcamp or Louis CK’s direct-to-customer DRM-free model. More casual consumers become overwhelmed by the variety of streaming platforms, many turning back to piracy, or worse, abandoning their consumption altogether. Digital distribution is a nightmare for consumers and creators alike.
If we could decentralize our media databases, things would be very different. A diversity of apps and platforms would still exist, but they would be thin strips of code layered on a deep shared data reservoir. This reservoir could contain a master copy of all works, submitted and formatted as preferred by their respective owners. Views on Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube could all be written to the same count on a movie’s universal metadata. A view on any of these platforms could compensate an artist in the exact same way. The creator could have the same bio, profile picture, and fan base across multiple platforms. These platforms would no longer compete on the breadth of their database, but the quality of their interfaces and the user experiences they offer. Such are the promises of a public decentralized media database.
In 2009, an elusive software engineer named Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the Bitcoin payment system to the internet. Using peer-to-peer open-source software, Bitcoin became the internet’s first blockchain: a distributed and growing list of cryptographically-verified unalterable records or, more prosaically, a decentralized public database. In 2016, the Bitcoin blockchain holds 60 gigabytes of data on an average of 5000 “nodes,” or publically run servers. More information on the technology and folklore of Bitcoin can be found [TK].
Bitcoin, forgo all controversy and skepticism, has proved the viability of blockchain databases. It has shown that individuals, when incentivized by currency, will host data and offer computational power to a shared cause. Decentralized data is real.
The implementation, growth, and maintenance of a blockchain is best preceded by a tokenized incentive. While some parties may be motivated to host and compute a blockchain for political or personal reasons, their contributions, alone, are unlikely to be enough to sustain a large database. More importantly, a large and diverse population of nodes is imperative to the very definition of a decentralized database.
With a decentralized media database, both consumers, businesses, and creators may be attracted to the notion of hosting. However, their motivations are not aligned without a token. A cryptocurrency hardcoded into the blockchain programs both humans and machines and aligns their incentives. In order to receive or write data to a tokenized blockchain, a user must circulate currency and contribute to its microeconomy. The token is attractive to all stakeholders in the platform and the blockchain, itself, cannot operate without it. Moreover, the value of a token is based on the value of the database on which it is built. This includes, but is not limited to the data maintained on the blockchain, the speed and efficiency with which the chain operates, and the health of the community of users that interact through it.
The value of the token is not just in aligning incentives. It is also an effective means for bootstrapping and user acquisition. The creators of a blockchain are in charge of the allocation of tokens. Developers may speculate on the value of their blockchain and allocate a share of tokens to themselves. These tokens are, initially, worthless. They only acquire value when the blockchain itself does. This further incentivizes developers to create a quality database.
Developers may also allocate an initial share of tokens to user acquisition. New users on the blockchain may be compensated in tokens just for joining. This poses no risk to no users and is a powerful enticement to engage with a new technology. It is literally free money. In the case of a media blockchain, developers could compensate creators in tokens for adding their content to the database.
The true value of a blockchain is in the service that its network and database can provide to users. It is the goal of a blockchain’s developers to grow this value and, in turn, increase the value of the tokens they hold. Developers do not “own” a blockchain, but they are intimately acquainted with it, and thus should be able to build killer applications for it. By creating a free application in the aforementioned “thin layer” over a decentralized database, developers can attract users and value.
On the high conceptual level, the strength of a token in blockchain implementation may be puzzling. It may be easier to think about tokenized blockchains as a logical evolution of the co-op business model:
A co-op is a business corporation that offers every member and employee an equal share of decision-making power and economic ownership. The model is both egalitarian and democratic, but offers no power hierarchy: it is decentralized. The success of the co-op business relies on the participation of and work of all of its employees, like any business, but employees are more incentivized to contribute to the business because their compensation is determined by the health of their company.
The co-op model protects employees from selfish leadership, as their is no opportunity for a larger owner in the company to liquidate his or her shares and/or layoff employees. The co-op model also prevents careless scaling. Inefficient growth means lower pay for everyone.
The primary overlap between tokenized networks and the coop model is that many users may have a share in the value of a “business” from its conception. Tokens, however, usually do not provide a holder with a vote or voice in the direction of a blockchain. Tokens holders can contribute to the health of a blockchains interior economy by spending, receiving and circulating their token, within it.
The stakeholders in a traditional co-op are the employees of a corporation, itself. In a tokenized network, both the developers and users have tokens. Developers hold token because its value appreciates with the use and value of their network. In the future, they can sell their tokens to other users, or spend them as users. (Users are not limited to one side of a transaction.) Their profit relies on the strength of the network and microeconomy they develop.
In the case of a co-op bakery, customers interface with the bakery like they would any other brick and mortar store. They do not pay a membership fee nor vote on the leadership and interior politics of the bakery. In fact, they probably prefer not to. The bakery provides a good/service for the customer, the co-op model provides a service for the employee.
The inclusion of customers as shareholders in the co-op could lead to a variety of issues. First and foremost, there inherently will be more customers than employees. This means that customers could implement advantageous policies (prices and cost-ineffective products) for themselves that hurt the wages of the employees and profitability of a business as whole. While customers may not want to do this (they have incentive to keep the bakery running), they do not inherently have the same share in the bakery that the bakers do. Their incentives may be aligned existentially, but there is no mechanism to enforce these beliefs. Profit dividends distributed to consumers may fruit some economic alignment, but the survival of the bakery is of far more significance to the bakers, as it is their livelihood. The primary function of the co-op model is to combat a centralized governance of an organization that could later lead to a questionable distribution of wealth and poor treatment of employees, specifically.
The tokenized blockchain takes the principles of a co-op one step further: all stakeholders have aligned incentives, but may not have the same share in the economy. This a more naturalistic and feasible approach to democratized and decentralized business. The health of the microeconomy is a priority to players of all sizes within it.
If we speculate on an alternative future for movie distribution with tokenized blockchains in mind, a near-utopian model of sharing becomes visible. This model, which I will refer to as “PopCoin,” can be thought of as a legitimized and more sustainable rethinking of the notorious free and open source “Popcorn-Time.”
Popcorn-Time is a software interface built on a centralized catalog of neatly arranged bittorrents of pirated movies and television. The PopCorn-Time metadata collection contains posters, descriptions, ratings and subtitles for a large library of bittorrents. These bittorrents, which can be accessed outside of the software, are more easily streamed through the reliable Popcorn-Time interface. User experience is also improved by access to contextual data and an established reliability and trust in the Popcorn-Time developers, who only link to quality torrented media. More about Popcorn-Time can be found [TK]
The PopCoin model, conversely, still relies on decentralized and torrented media, but shares it legally. Metadata is hosted on a blockchain that not only indexes information about the movie, but also who has a license to stream or download it. Users are compensated in PopCoin for their contributions and hosting of this “PopChain.” The movies, themselves, may be hosted by fans, studios, and investors, who are all compensated by the PopChain for sharing with their peers. A user can spend their PopCoin to stream or download a movie. Peers who help deliver the file receive a small share of this PopCoin, while the majority is sent to the movie’s owner. By eliminating a middleman like Netflix or iTunes, creators are able to slash prices for their media while receiving more profits. This is the brilliance of decentralization.
Developers of the PopChain allocate a share of PopCoins for themselves, and distribute an initial allocation to serious independent movie fans. Developers then take another share of tokens and give them to filmmakers who agree to have their work cataloged on the PopChain. These developers then develop a free PopCoin interface that makes the PopChain accessible to common users. Speculating on the potential of the PopChain, financially motivated investors may purchase PopCoin from developers, fans and filmmakers, bringing more monetary value to the token. If PopCoin provides better experiences for users and compensation for filmmakers than existing platforms, it has the potential to disrupt online movie distribution. This disruption starts with a network effect.
CONT>>>> (deep work coming)
