ETHBerlin³ Keynote: Alec Empire - The Sovereign Creator

foreign [Music] yeah uh good morning um I'm Alec Empire I'm from a group called Atari teenage Riot and I've been involved in what we Loosely describe as hacker culture since three decades 30 years a little bit longer and because Berlin had this this part on the website and the manifesto we thought we could maybe go back and look at the pass at the at the values in the from the beginning how the culture how these ideas infiltrated the culture and then changed a lot of people's minds and so on um I think sometimes you know in in I've seen this many times now in in my life makes sense to you know when you feel like maybe things have gotten wrong or have gone wrong and you end up on the wrong path you go back to the fundamentals to the principles to the values and remind yourself why are we here what's the purpose so we can navigate better into the future right so my view on all this stuff is always that of of a creative person okay so I'm not really here to give some sort of tech talk or so our um perspective was always very kind of different from everybody else in the music world and you will see why in a second and the feedback we got from the hacker scene very early on was that it's kind of interesting to have Outsiders sort of like social rejects uh you know people on the fringes who look at these developments from a different perspective that can you know that inspired some people so I think that's also why I was invited and I think it's great to talk here after two years of lockdowns and having no shows and stuff this is like the first event uh that I appear on so thanks again for that um so it's important I think to understand like that in the 80s end of the 80s there wasn't a lot of culture like that around right so when Timothy C May wrote the crypto Anarchist Manifesto I mean people I think people were inspired to write code and all that stuff you know all that but these things also had an impact on a very small underground scene of musicians and artists at the time and this information traveled very slow right I mean it wasn't like you read something on a Blog and then it was out there and then the next day you had all these ideas right I mean it was often maybe a piece of paper somebody had a fax or something we all read books like Neuromancer and stuff like that so because there was not so much stuff around it had it influenced us um and we thought there must be culture there must be art there must be music that is reflecting those values right and that was in 1988 when we started yeah being really like we thought I was very young at the time and we thought okay that's the future that's the future we have to create and there has to be music and visuals and all that stuff at the same time because otherwise it becomes like just some abstract thing and people maybe don't adapt uh and don't understand these ideas this is uh the line that really made it for me you know combined with emerging information markets crypto Anarchy will create a liquid market for any and all material which can be put into words and pictures arise you have nothing to lose but your Barbed wired fences right and if you yeah I think it's an amazing line I was in Berlin at the time I was I'm born in Berlin so I grew up I grew up on the west side but on the East there was the war and everybody who wants to understand what the what we call the tyranny of spaces can look at Berlin 30 years ago 80s earlier people locked in by a socialist government or tyranny regime whatever you want to call it you can't leave there's a war you just captured in that space and you can't move right so these things in that context were very powerful it was like okay there will be another layer on on the sort of like non-virtual world right we didn't really see how far this could go but the idea was we want a different world right the nation states should slowly vanish you know it felt like just wrong to be I don't know governed by people that didn't even know who we were what we wanted and so on so this stuff was inspiring for us so in at the end of 1989 right the Berlin War Falls and I think Looking Back Now this is a huge moment because what it shows us we were in the Industrial Age and then that around that time we entered the information age and when you live through an event like this it feels okay a lot of things are changing wow where are we and you don't really know yet because these things don't go like okay you wake up and next morning oh now we're in the information age right that's nobody sees it like that but looking back there are political events or even sometimes cultural events can work like that too where you go okay that was actually a defining moment you know soon after the the Soviet Union collapsed globalization set in in the 90s things became much more connected it was possible for musicians and artists to travel much easier and so on okay so and that shift I think um was reflected in the culture we were making at the time okay and we formed this group called The territina's Riot um it was a reaction to also far right and Neo-Nazi groups that were very powerful at the time they were running the streets attacking concerts and so on and we thought okay the old answer was let's get together fight back and we could do this for the rest of our lives or we use our minds and use a computer to amplify our ideas and then hopefully win people's minds over because you can use violence as long as you want you don't convince anybody right so that was the basic uh motivation to start this group and we didn't see ourselves as musicians I think that's important to understand we didn't see ourselves as a sort of band because to us already this felt like a phenomenon from the Industrial Age it was like you know you have musicians everyone plays an instrument you use Muscle of strength and force to do I don't know bang on a drum while we were sitting typing stuff on the Atari 1040 St computer and it was huge energy that was produced right so it was really a different mindset and a different different working method and a lot of people from the music industry hated that stuff okay this is an Atari 1040 St two megabyte Ram we use that and during the 90s we basically undercut all the other bands or the other musicians you would go to the Festival stage there would be 20 000 people going absolutely crazy and there would be just this computer on stage and people were working at these places were very angry they were like you guys you're gonna kill our jobs you know you you play rock and roll what are you doing so now it's very obvious it's like you would go to an event and of course there would be some guy with a laptop right or an artist with a laptop so that's normal now but back in the day it was kind of confrontational and provoke people and they were scared of that um so this is a record um called delete yourself [Music] it was released in in Europe and then a few years later in America and we changed the title to burn Berlin burn and um delete yourself with this kind of dystopian statement it was about we've written most of the music in 1992 it was a warning from the about the coming surveillance state um these these topics were not so common in science fiction you know we had libertarian science fiction books and so on and but it to to criticize the the structure of the state was I mean in the music scene it this was not really common right especially not in electronic music so when this record came out um in America it sold a million records and it went gold Okay so I remember sitting in like offices with record company Executives who wanted to make money of this stuff because we always controlled our own work and I think that's really important to if you want to become more Sovereign as an artist you need to be able to control your work okay the the the your own creativity a lot of people sign some Deals they don't know what they're getting into and then they become some sort of puppets or employees or something and it can be very frustrating career or whatever so but anyway so people were asking me how do you do that that's impossible so you basically on a cheap computer make this stuff while we are spending all this money on these big Productions and you guys come on stage and you you know you just blow everybody away right so there was this sense okay things are changing the music industry from the Industrial Age was disappearing but it took quite a while okay and then in 1999 we get this movie The Matrix and there are still online debates about okay who stole what from from whom the photo that you saw on the record earlier that's from like 1992 this is 1999 so what I'm trying to explain is that culture artists can make stuff in the underground and these ideas travel and at some point they become more mainstream and I think a lot of people also inspired by movies like The Matrix so I think it's important never to forget how influential even small things can become you know um so in 1999 also as a reaction we put out a music video called Revolution action I want to play a fraction I don't want to play the whole thing but you get an idea what it was it was all over all the music television channels at the time and then right after it was shown a couple of times it got banned in most countries I don't know if you can hear the sound wait do you have the sound it's a sound man okay I think I got it let me just why is this I have to change the uh sorry there's something changed here okay whatever actions [Music] things feel empty lately you have put your dreams to sleep muck ER pretend to face the relocation of your head inside your rectum has indeed evoked feelings of hollowness [Music] there's something wrong out there sir what do you mean everybody's losing their faces we really have to investigate welcome and uh yeah and so on okay so I think you can get the idea um it was so funny to get the um the opinions for you know like the reasons basically from these uh MTV people was like what you're showing that we realized what you're saying with the video it's not just some abstract statement there's Wall Street and you're attacking the corporate culture and so on and so it had to get shut down okay there was also another event in America a student put up a poster for the record release and uh the police was called in because people thought okay they wanna there's my there might be some school shooting or some Revolution and the whole university got evacuated and stuff like that okay so um when I talked to other hackers especially like in around the time 2010 and this is what you see the the hecka activism I think is really becoming important 2008 2009 2010 as a response to the great financial crisis many people told me look they've I've seen the video and stuff like that and then I got into these ideas and then that made me become who I wanted to be right so um I think culture can do their job if it's you know if it's not trying to manipulate but if you yeah if you get inspired somehow and you want to take action yourself you want to determine your own life okay so um I don't know if you've ever been to a concert like ours but this is like basically what a show is um it's a good I think impression it's very like here this is a show in in Germany 20 000 people [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Applause] this was I don't know if you could see it there was a photographer a visual artist we work with Zen Lyons he also did the installation When you entered the crypto winter visuals with our music and he was there to take photos and suddenly he saw that people climbed over the barricades and everybody stormed the stage you know and then you know this went absolutely out of control security was not happy here's another thing we released an iPhone app and uh May 2010 it got taken down in the app store because of you know the frequencies might harm the speakers of the phone but quite funny we love these kind of trolling things right um then a little bit later in in early 2012 there was this event where we um licensed a track called black fat black flags to Sony for an ad for the PS Vita but we referenced the uh many anonymous hackers and Wikileaks in the uh in the track and then we took the money that we got from Sony and donated it to um a law firm that defended you remember these cases where some teenager um took the PlayStation apart and and and installed his own uh software or something and got taken to court by Sony or something but anyway the money was recycled and went there right from Sony and and uh then this blew up also in the press and I remember I was in LA at the time and somebody from Sony was like well like you achieved what you always want to achieve you would never work in this town ever again right so but I thought you know it was wrong what they did and we can do what we want with the money so this is uh our t-shirt is the most selling t-shirt if that means anything uh keep the internet free from government control um I still think that's that's what I believe in I've I've seen bureaucrats often making things far worse um I think it's the same with music it should never be regulated I think the same about code I think if you have to ask bureaucrat for permission to do something when you want to do something productive let's say you wrote code or you make music or whatever and that bureaucrat has never produced anything in his life there's a problem right and I think we see that constantly this clash with people who don't understand anything but they want to set the terms and the rules just because they have the guns basically in the background right so I think it was great that we were able to spread this this idea it was it worked as a sort of Gateway for people to they love the energy of the music they read this they keep thinking about it and then they discover all the the information in the background okay that's that then we put out a video criticism of web 2 that social media has been we criticize it right from the beginning we thought it's it yeah we saw all the threats coming this was a video a little bit inspired by uh 1984 the movie it's now I think for people like you here it's maybe obvious but in the culture we were always The Outsiders right people say oh you're tyrannical what are you criticizing it's great you know you can do promotion [Music] to action foreign [Music] this was you know this is our sense of humor kind of to go back always sometimes through these 80s you know to the way uh hacker culture was portrayed in 80s movies and stuff this is a concept in Colombia I mean I could go on and on this is uh me speaking at the chaos Computer Club uh in 2014 I gave the keynote speech there and this is kind of builds the bridge to what I actually want to talk about today there I show the triangle I don't know if you can see it from far back it's you might know it when you had a job or something there is time speed quality and the price somebody has to pay and you can never get high quality fast at a very low price right this is I think everybody who had a deadline had this problem and I pointed out at the time what was happening in the culture is that because of the the uh artists and creators were not really paid by you know the Silicon Valley companies if you put the the price to zero what happens is you create this kind of toxic culture and you kind of freeze culture so yeah this was completely against the narrative at the time where people thought okay you give away a free for everything we just put ads there then we'll be fine right I mean people just watch ads I just read a story about YouTube they want to force people now to watch five ads I think in a row so they can't click away these companies I think are just in the ad advertising business and in my opinion if you can't control the work and what kind of ads appear next to your work you can't become a sovereign artist right so I I question completely this model and I think that's why ethereum is so important so art often changes first then the culture does but this is also important I think and that's what I experience technology changes but human nature does not okay so because I've met so many people who were like we have this great idea and people have to behave in a certain way to use the technology or to be on a certain platform and so on but I think it is I think that's you have to keep this in mind there are toxic people out there there are people who lie and and deceive others and the technology might not be able to solve that you know so one thing that I always noticed um in all these conversations all over the years that most people couldn't answer this question I don't know do you know what in your opinion is music frequency not bad but okay this is a half true is numbers in time and nothing else so if anybody tries to tell you something mystical you know people take LSD or whatever and then something happens the gods or whatever it's it's it's wrong it's just numbers in time okay this is a score in Hayden Liam I think it's it's a great composition when you see when you look these these lines this is the time the nodes the height of the node is the frequency like the person there said right the frequency is the number that's the pitch and in the notes there is a little information captured the length and the time that's what it is that's how people communicate it hundreds of years ago musical compositions to others over continents because there was no recording device now um what I think is important and and it's so simple that most people never think about this um and you have this in culture all the time and drives me crazy right it's let's say seven plus five right is seven plus five okay great thank you I mean to be honest when I have these conversations with musicians uh there is often silenced something it's a trick question but okay but how do we know it's true right and I think you guys probably go like what does that even I mean of course but I had since the 90s with these sort of postmodernist type uh uh people in the creative scene they were like Yeah well yeah what about if we all agree that seven plus five is you know 11.99 you will never know we can agree on that and I said look if you wanna build a skyscraper you want to fly a plane all these things and your Collective can agree on this lie as long as they want you will have a hard time right I think this is what's happening in with numbers of streaming followers likes views all these corrupted data is coming in and people think they can get away with it I think it's some sort of like a huge building that's about to collapse because all these lies corrupted right so yes there is truth and it's so important that uh that we don't forget that okay if I this is a photo of me taking a walk with my Shiba Inu it's uh he's called Yuki um on the beach and a dog doesn't understand numbers right this is numbers are how human beings make sense of the world that's how we navigate through everything okay it's so simple but most people I talk to never think about that stuff so this brings me to something else this is a discussion I had for 30 years people wonder why their privacy is not being respected and I think these two things go hand in hand without property rights nobody has the right to privacy property rights and privacy rights are individual rights if somebody can just walk into your house because you don't own it you have no privacy and vice versa okay and I think a lot of the times people get lost in these endless debates this is the principle right um I don't know if you read Pinocchio if you watched the the movies or whatever but there's a great scene I think in the Old World Disney version of it they go to this island or the children go there everything is free you can you know follow any desire you want and there's this great little moment where he's uh with an ax destroying a piano and the other guy is you know painting on top of the Mona Lisa and I think it's a secret like little thing a piece of truth that we see like if we go on Open Sea if we go like wherever online over the last 20 years if people don't value creativity they end up in these kind of spaces and I think that creates a toxic environment people can try to fight hate speech as much as they want right but if you don't can't control your works and your photos and your information and all this stuff you end up in this nightmare world I think Frederick bastia has said it perfectly right when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it and this is very true the the law if if these kinds of people change things around you don't have a chance so it's it's it's so important to understand that this this fundamental principle we must defend that all the time okay so in 2020 and this is the to me that that's such a frustrating time now because I think we've seen where we ended up it feels like we've gone around in a circle right this is this word now is like being de-globalized we see the rise of a rise of nationalism again these ideas and with that of course comes protectionism um we as artists we need the world we need a free market a global market where everybody can participate in we can't have like some people say well no you can't go into this country you can't you know like oh yeah where you have to pay an extra tax if you want to go there I think what we will see is like a lot of the artists who are stuck in the old world they they aren't the creativity will stagnate and I think that's not good that's why it's important that we still connect with everybody around the globe right because what we see out there I think is it's a very dangerous uh um situation right now and I just took the screenshot you know I love this Jeremy lays out a goal to assume leading military role in Europe and then you see on top the like the merge historic moment or just in the crypto hives for me that's like this is in a way sums it up what we're talking about okay so yeah um which brings me to this nfts um Global private rules-based property rights system I always add in cyberspace to it which is the answer right um with that um I want to quickly explain to you if we have enough time um how I I actually see music You Know music in my opinion works like this all the frequencies what I mentioned earlier are the numbers they already exist in the universe right all the combinations what you've seen on the on the musical score that I showed earlier that stuff the combinations exist we just have to unlock them so I see them see this as think about you want to mine gold or something you have to find the gold mine you have to do the work you have to get the gold out of the ground okay and this is how we look at music because most musicians they just do something and they don't know where it's coming from but no two human beings can create the same piece of music at the same time or like in in even with a time distance if they didn't know the other piece from the other person so in a way a music composition a creation is always the mirror of of a unique individual so you know if people always say about it it's more like that you know it belongs to the collective uh you know people grew up in a certain country I say yeah you get influence that's true but the idea comes from the individual okay and that's really important and that's why I think ethereum you know can help us Empower these types of uh creators okay which brings me to this statement it's a bold statement at this point but I think I defended ethereum gives rise to the Sovereign Creator because we have to ask ourselves who do we want to see right do we want some artists who is being paid by ad money from some corporations or do we want somebody who is Sovereign who maybe criticizes the status quo I find this more inspiring I get much more from that than people who just entertain and say nothing okay so this is a something you might have come across right investment assets segmented by their liquidity and the question is at this point where would you put crypto you know I think it's at this point is I mean of course it's the most liquid one um but depending on on on how you use it you can end up even in other sections of that now this is everyone knows this one what a lot of people never think about is this one these are asset classes by sovereignty and this is where the music compositions is okay if I travel if I have to leave Germany there's an emergency I have to flee the country this goes comes with me that's why it's so important to have this system being Global okay because if you and by the way a lot of the stuff that we've seen over the last two decades was constant attacks on this because if they can attack that and destroy that they take all the power and control away from the individual and who is they it can be the government it can be corporations this is what they're often after okay the ideas oh you wrote this type of code you're a criminal now or whatever you wrote this piece of music you criticize the government or whatever where we shut you down okay I want you to really uh think about this because I don't think people have it on their radar enough this is an uh a funny meme we we did this is like you know we cut out all the middlemen and this provoked a lot of [ __ ] storms online because this is how I see it right it's like I create and then the the buyer or the fan or whoever is linked straight to us because two minds connected the the information we connected through the information uh yeah music nfts I don't know how much time we still have ah no okay good because that's almost I'm almost at the end um I quickly want to show you a um an nft we put out in in uh in April that was great and that to me is a little it's a good way to describe how this future will maybe work right so I was online and there was this artist milanda from Mexico and we decided to do this collaboration and within you know a few days we could put this up and immediately it was sold it just was just one unique uh item so a lot of fans were angry but I still think it came out good and these kind of collaborations could be also a normal thing in the next decade on this decade you know so you're not dependent on the city you live in you just connected to everybody in the world foreign [Music] violence we might not always win so uh yeah we have written a sovereign Creator Manifesto I wanted actually to go through all the parts but I think we don't have enough time anymore so we will put that up online but I think I just want to also say thank you to everyone involved in ethereum for us it's the only way forward it's a huge inspiration again at some point I thought I might have to give up because that word is never coming I think the world is getting better and always remember this this is like mountain of gold of unlocked potential out there right a lot of creatives they don't even think like this now when they do when they come on board it would be a great time you know it will really uh it would change everything to the positive side okay so thank you