In Sonic Screen’s first issue, Proof of Sound, the collaborative project investigated the associations and relationships between “decentralization” and sound as a medium, along with their potential agency. Decentralized technologies are imagined as the pharmakon of our current reality — as much a poison as an antidote. If there is no center, how can there be governance? Yet, if platform governance strengthens those voices that undermine universal values, such as in hate speech, can decentralization improve this situation? Who will determine our values, and what value will voices have?
A pertinent incident has been the NFT prank by Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike, which exposed the fact that the decentralized Web3 NFT platform is not responsible for storing or managing NFT image data, meaning an expensive NFT can easily be substituted with another image. Hence decentralization remains only an ideal, as the much hyped NFT still relies on a material basis of technology with centralized storage. With this in mind, how can centralized storage processing cope with technology’s decentralization, or will there always be a balancing act between centralization and decentralization? Here, can sound serve as a guidance, showing us how to build a new system of noise, a kind of uncontrollable cyborg?
This issue’s theme revolves around the three following prompts: “Storage” – “Value” – “Governance”.
- Sound as a storage medium ➡︎ As a recording material, sound and the data of digitized audio play a distinctive cultural role.
- Sound as a medium of value ➡︎ The commercial demand for sound or as a medium of exchange, in the form of shared sound effects libraries, unique audio NFTs, and so on.
- Sound as a medium of governance ➡︎ Sound as a regulatory medium, through broadcasting, AI speech recognition, data surveillance, etc.
A Storage Medium: Records, Data, and Archiving
Where Derrida in Archive Fever regards the storage of data as being at the origin of the construction of power, then the decentralization of storage in this generation ought to herald an “archival turn”. However, when we begin to consider the traceability of the archives constructed in this context, the verifiability of the digital information that is uploaded to the cloud, we run into trouble: how do we identify the “vocalizers” of these files, and hold them accountable? Amidst the iterations of codes and platforms, how do we reach consensus? Data signals do not correspond to the reality: at every processing stage—when keyed into the cloud, transferred, compressed, and copied— the updated versions of audio signals have undergone multiple reincarnations. Every response or rewrite gives new meaning to the original information, and the information can become empowered overnight. These digital voices should be assigned unique identities, so that they can be attributed, shared, and transferred in the digital world, which could possibly solve part of this problem.
A Medium of Value: Exchange, Stored Value and Fluidity
What are the qualities of a sound that give it value? When did sound start to be measured in value? Did it begin with its archivability? Before the invention of audio recording media, sound could only be described in words, pictures, or symbols (music notation). Time-based and ephemeral in its original form, it is only through the objectification of sound that it can be analyzed, transformed, or presented. But now when we recognize a sound, do we actually hear the sound itself —or is it an audio recording? We have the ability to store, compile, sort, and delete sounds. We can filter out sounds. We have invented radio devices to pick up the sounds that are valuable to us and disregard those that are not. In this day and age, every individual to some degree can determine sound’s value.
A Medium of Governance: Control, Logic, and Organization
Who governs and regulates sound, how do they do it, and for what purposes? Colonial governments, post-colonial nationalism, or does it come under the platform capitalism of transnational corporations?
Code is Law. The DAO, the first decentralized autonomous organisation, allowed a community vote to change its code so that the Ethereum blockchain could continue to operate. Within a few months of its release, the DAO had been hacked, triggering this decision to “hard fork” Ethereum in order to backtrack and restore the blockchain’s data. While attempting to minimize their losses, the DAO project was terminated and the newly split branch became today’s Ethereum. This rollback decision was not written in the DAO’s code, but was in fact made through community consensus, voting to modify the code as an emergency solution.
On the one hand, the code is equivalent to the law, and on the other hand, blockchain participants can directly or indirectly participate in the making of the laws. At this stage in the technology, it is clear that such a system of organization is still vulnerable, whether due to loopholes in the code or a “rug pull” (similar to embezzlement) by the developers. Nevertheless, this new technology promises a method of governance that opens up fresh ways for imagining collaborative work.
This issue’s three prompts build on blockchain’s impossible triangle —its metrics of decentralization, security, and scalability— to extend our reflections on storage, value and governance. We hope that contemplations around these three propositions can also enrich the vision we have for co-working and collectivity within our own team of editors and writers. Perhaps it is possible to draw some insight from the friction caused by the Indonesian group ruangrupa in their curation of the mainstream western art exhibition, Documenta 15 in Kassel. After all, both the successes and failures of such a collective are very much dependent on the people involved as well as the environment. A team’s tacit rapport is difficult to reproduce, let alone across different cultures and contexts. If blockchain technology is about decentralized collaboration in the digital world, how do we deal with the varying value judgements between different cultures? Instead of maintaining our reliance on the extractive economic model of exploiting cheap electricity and water resources to build large-scale data centers, what can be other solutions for data storage? And how can we negotiate consensus for governance within these different kinds of situations? —[SCR]
