 Last week, as we all know, no matter your politics or your level of attention as such matters, it really was a bit of a nail-biter for everybody. One of the major reasons that we move the summit from October, where it traditionally is and will be in future years, too, after the election, is because we didn't want to spend two days talking about what's going to happen in two weeks. You know, we wanted to get past the election and get a little bit of clarity and really try to get a sense and understanding of who's going to control this town and what does that mean. And particularly, we wanted to pay attention to what does, what does this all mean for creative communities and for cultural policy. Superficially, it may seem that not a lot has changed, but there's always more than each more than meets the eye with stuff like technology and cultural policy today. We're going to take a big picture view with our big thinkers. You like that? Big thinkers. Who will talk about how artists and policy wonks can help shape government and public policy for the benefit of the nation. We're thrilled to have with us today best-selling author, Thomas Frank, Sasha Meinrath, the director of New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute and artist musician, Rebecca Gates. Thanks, guys. So just, just, just weighed right into it. Is that the idea? Stand at the podium or no? Podium? No, I just did. All right, we'll do, we'll do a proper panel discussion here. First, all those people in the hall, get in here. What are you doing? They're not even paying attention. All right, so I'm not exactly a freelance writer anymore. I'm a columnist for Harper's Magazine. And before that, I was a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. And these are about, you know, two of the best jobs you can get in the dwindling field of, you know, journalism, the, you know, quickly collapsing field that I work in. But there's a lot of useful comparisons, nevertheless, between, you know, the world that I work in and the world of music. I remember when I started in journalism back in the 1990s, a bunch of my friends worked at a magazine in Chicago called In These Times. Do y'all remember this? In These Times. And we're, I saw a bunch of them the other day and we were talking about back in those days the barriers to entry in journalism were, you know, were so huge that even a magazine like that could, you know, had this long line of authors standing outside the door waiting to get published. And today, of course, there's no barriers to entry at all or very, very few. You know, if you want to be a writer, it's, you know, all, you have to get one of these things. I don't know if you've heard of them, their laptops or, you know, these smartphones that people have. You see people with them all the time. And I'm making a joke, folks. There's no barriers to entry at all. But there's also, it's also really damn hard to make a living at it. And I speak as someone who's, you know, worked at these publications where they built the paywall and then, you know, fought with the audience over this and that and, but the social conditions that, you know, while the barriers to entry have fallen, the social conditions that used to prop up journalism all over America have basically, you know, disappeared. It's very difficult to earn a living as a journalist, you know, outside of one of the big nationally known publications. And, you know, just look around at the Midwest where the ground is strewn with corpses of dead newspapers. The, in fact, the last time I spoke on a panel in this room, it was at this very table, we talked about the future of journalism and the only sort of, you know, ironic the future of journalism. And now I'm here to talk about, pretend I know something about the future of music. The future of journalism as I saw it then was the only sort of hope on the horizon. I mean, there were a lot of good ideas out there, but none of them had a, you know, had a prayer of being enacted, you know, specifically what I'm talking about are various kinds of subsidies for newspapers. And that's never happened and probably never will happen. But the one thing that has happened is you have these sort of would-be William Randolph Hearst types all over America snapping up, you know, dying newspapers and using them just as a platform for their editorial voice. So the entire news-gathering operation has just become this support mechanism for, you know, a publisher that wants to spread the gospel according to Ein Rand, you know, or something like that. Look, subsidies for newspapers or for journalism are off the table these days, but should you want to play in some kind of edgy indie rock festival, you've got, I think, more opportunities today than ever before. If you're not interested in getting paid, you remember when we were young, when I was young anyways, punk rock was this kind of unthinkable abomination. You guys remember those days? I'm talking like in the 1970s, the early 1980s. Today, every city in America wants a piece of that action, okay? I'm from Kansas City. They had, we had one of those edgy indie rock festivals that have been springing up all over the country. We've got one there now. The mayor of Kansas City came and spoke at it, right? This has been unthinkable when I was a child. I mean, today, your edgy indie rock festival is subsidized by your local chamber of commerce, right? The federal government itself is keen to arrange some kind of support from the various foundations and Wall Street banks. Now, we all know what I'm talking about here, the sort of strategy for using vibrancy to make cities more desirable, encourage economic recovery. Wait, I should stop. Do you guys want me to go on about this or should I just shut up? Dive in on some kind of, dive in on a little bit. This is going to get really controversial in a second. Oh, that's fine. And I have a feeling that I'm going to, okay. Cut to the controversial part. Look, I don't, I'm very much in favor of government funding for the arts, right? I'm, I get sentimental about the WPA. I went to an elementary school built by the WPA, as a matter of fact. And I love those, you know, murals in the post offices all across the Midwest. I love that kind of stuff. What I don't like is when we, is when we subsidize art for palpably bogus reasons, like propping up real estate values or, you know, trying to revive deindustrialized urban areas. It, what this, the reason I don't like it is because it reduces art to artists and specifically to, to, you know, the hipster, right? That's the, that's the product that everybody's after. You know, this, I'm trying to read my own handwriting here. This is a kind of, of, you know, journalism is an adversarial practice that no politician on earth wants to subsidize. But hipsterism is a kind of pseudo adversarial practice that everybody wants to throw money at, you know. Now the problem with it is that it's, in my view, well, aggressively banal. Look, it's gonna fail as an urban renewal strategy for a bunch of reasons, because it's based on bad data and because it's based on the sort of zero sum idea that cities can compete with one another and that'll somehow build up the whole, you know. And this doesn't work. It doesn't work when you, when states try to, you know, cut taxes and lure businesses from Kansas to Missouri or something like that. And it doesn't work when they build rival fake Bohemias either. But what, the reason it will, I mean, it'll also fail as a strategy for producing good art. I mean, I can't think of a single artist or musician of my acquaintance who really likes to think of themselves as part of some, you know, hipster, raconquista of some dilapidated urban neighborhood. You know, there's, I don't know if a single person that thinks that's why they went into doing what they do or why that's, you know, that that's the way they wanna spend their lives. So this, this way, according to this way of looking at art and music, it's about the, it's not about the art itself, it's about the scene, right? The art lifestyle. Art is an act that we put on for the business class, you know, these sort of creative japes that we do in order to make, you know, Indianapolis seem like a more desirable place to live than Akron or something like that. And the only good thing that I can think of about, I mean, look, it supports a lot of friends of mine and it's made lots of areas more livable and all that sort of thing. But it might finally, I think, turn people's, turn people against the conquest of cool, which has been going on for such a long time. When you use government power, say eminent domain or, you know, TIF districts or something like that to push out blue collar workers and turn their neighborhood over to, you know, theater majors on the ground that you're going to build the next Wicker Park this way. That's when even the theater majors themselves will finally say they've had enough of this and sign up for the backlash, I hope. All right, I'm gonna build, try and, I don't know what to speak to in all of that. Maybe you just spin it out. Just ignore it and go on. Well, I mean, one of the things that's interesting is, so I played to a little background. I started playing music full time in 1993, I guess. It started in 91, quit doing it full time in 2001 and now veer back and forth between sort of sound art, arts production and then I'm working on a record and touring and doing that right now. So it's in the forefront of my practice. But part of one of my artistic interests is land arts and one of the things you think of is like public space, public art. Also, how do you light up actual physicalities? How do you light up city? So it's part of that is of interest to me is as a musician, like as an in this culture of music, there's a lot of things that we're asked to represent. There's a lot of different ways of defining yourself as a working artist, as an artist in general, as a musician. And so what's been interesting to me is to work with colleagues and think how can not only we build a vocabulary and build tools so that we actually have an attempt at some sort of robust practice, whatever form we want that to take in the current environment, both in terms of public policy and in terms of tech. And then also as creative people or as musicians are speaking for myself, what's my role in my community and what can I help light up in terms of issues that I think are important or in terms of infrastructure. And also, how can we start moving artists out of what Tom just talked about in terms of you're only interesting to the public sector if you're available for a benefit or if you're only available to present a certain kind of cool, a presenter of marketable codification of like what the success of a city is, et cetera. And it's just ground zero and there's so much work in so many areas to just explore in terms of developing that vocabulary. So what's interesting to me is thinking in terms of what is the musician as an active citizen look like. And there's so many answers and there's not a lot of answers right now. So one of the things is how do you step outside of that definition of this is who you are and whether that's someone coming from a tech position or a business position and saying this is our service. It is the only service that really needs to exist and we will make sure that our service is what is paramount and then you will feed us and you'll feed into our service and actually say, no, can we turn that around? So it would, and can we just say we need delivery platforms. We need to be active citizens in our community. We need to make sure that we're represented and that our interests are represented. So, you know, it's a lot for me and what's compelling is there is the grayscale and nuance and complexity and something that I think there's a lot of, to use the I word, a lot of innovation happening on all levels in design and in tech that, well, you know, I think Sasha might be able to speak to that but that is actually a really interesting time. And so it's trying to, one of the things that's compelling to me is to think like what is the shape of the musician who chooses to activate and be active and advocate in their community. It's not saying that everyone should. So bridging from the conquest of cool into actual like technology. Total uncool, that's right. It's actually very cool, it's punk. Sure, so let me maybe bookend this by taking up this notion of the role of the active citizen. I work here inside the belly of the beast every day. I work with Congress folks and White House folks and various government officials and various agencies. And it's an interesting time. It's an incredibly interesting time, not because we've actually won anything. I think actually we've got sort of triumphalism run amuck here in DC right now. We have a lot of high-minded rhetoric and almost no meaningful action. And what I look to is all this is then this opportunity for the kind of change that we've been told is coming imminently any moment just tomorrow. And that meaningful change will never happen without an activated cudgel-wielding citizenry that's holding people accountable. And by that I look to Obama and I look to the last four years of him in office and what's happened here in DC. And what we've seen is a whole lot of simulacra, approximations of democracy without actually getting democratic processes in place. We have multi-stakeholderism run amuck in terms of endless deliberation but not decision-making across a variety of different sectors. And in tech and telecom and media this is probably one of the most egregiously stagnant areas of national decision-making. No one really knows what to do with these problems and they are serious conundrums of no simple answers that are guaranteed to disrupt some incredibly powerful entrenched lobbies to get addressed. And that's a real problem if you are an elected official in the current state of democracy in America. And so I think in some ways the public sector has granted this free pass for the last four years to the Democratic administration and that needs to end. I think without the kind of watchdogging that we absolutely need to do that it's our responsibility to be doing our government and the processes of democracy become increasingly distorted. So they become less accountable they become less accessible in a lot of ways. They become much less diverse in terms of their thoughts and actions. The notions of how you solve problems narrows to the point of being absolutely ludicrously dumbfoundingly oversimplified. And they become more ossified and that leads to economic as well as cultural stagnation which I fear is where we're heading in coming years. And so there's this desperate need for key decision-makers to be held accountable in order to address certain fundamental problems. And I'll point to just three and then stop. Let's assume for a moment we're successful in bridging the digital divide that we have broadband access, affordable broadband access and adoption of broadband across, not just the country but across the globe. Today we look at things like Pandora and this is not to poo-poo Pandora but rather to say we look to that as the solution for copyright problems that are deeply entrenched. And I'll tell you right now, if we are successful in bridging the digital divide, Pandora will not solve this fundamental problem. It won't solve it because most people on the planet simply can't afford Pandora. The lower two, three quintiles of everyone on the planet can't afford that business model. And so what happens in that kind of environment? Well, you have piracy that makes the piracy that exists today look like child's play. And I don't see anyone addressing that reality that the successes that we're striving to achieve as a society create new profound problems that are far worse than what we face today. A second issue is the lockdown of technologies, the elimination of our rights as end users and participants in media production and consumption whereby the features and functions of our technologies are becoming increasingly limited in what we can do. I look at my home stereo system and multimedia server with fear every time I attempt to add a component to it because even though I am tech savvy, I can't get the damn thing to work with HDMI. And it makes me bonkers. The fact that I have to jailbreak my cell phones and eliminate windows from my laptops to get the features and function that I want is crazy. And these limiters on what we can do and produce are ever increasing and they're happening behind the scenes in a way that we don't even realize that that's happening. And third, I want to point to this notion of the rise of an intranet era. That when everyone's communicating and has the capacity on their cell phones to communicate in a peer to peer direct manner that that creates new perturbations. It disrupts all entrenched media. It disrupts the broadcast media in particular. And I think it harkens the end of an entire broadcast era that we've been living through for the last 7,500 years. And again, there's no processes or protocols or regulations or mandates overseeing what this should look like, how to make these transitions happening. And they are inevitable, but these are transitions that will either be incredibly disruptive or could be graceful if key decision makers are informed, make the right choices now. And that will only happen if all of you get involved. All right, see you guys later. Well, I have a couple of questions for both of you. One is we spoke, there's implicit, it seems, is some disappointment in the past four years and what shape can at least the next four years take. Two, is it safe to assume that cultural affairs are part of a government and civic mandate? And three, as these sort of red arrow areas are identified as sort of agreed to go on points of strategy, what is the role of it? What would be helpful in terms of musicians stepping into their communities and activating that change and helping with that strategy? You can answer, any of those are none. I'll talk about cultural mandates because I think this is important in terms of the trajectory that we're on as a country. So we're going through the beginnings, the initial perturbations of fiscal austerity in this country. And so it's gonna become a question of societal norms as to what are we going to cut? And I think like be Athens, don't be Sparta. How about we cut corporate welfare? I think there's a lot of things that can be cut. I worry that the things that are gonna get cut are cultural fair first, not things like military spending. And we know like, when we harken back and think about like the cradle of democracy, we're not thinking in terms of a militaristic Sparta, we're thinking about the cultural flourishing that came out of Athens. And in a society whereby we forego cultural fair, I think we inevitably end up on a footing that throughout all of human history has always led to the downfall of an empire. Yeah, it's important to subsidize the art, but it should be, to subsidize art, but it should be done for the subsidize art for art's sake rather than for to build real estate values or something. By the way, so I wrote this essay and I was in Kansas City, I was visiting my family in Kansas City and Kansas City has a very active sort of art support community foundations, various people somewhere in between government in the private sector and they're very successful. And then in the state, this is Kansas City's in Missouri, the state of Kansas has just finished abolishing their arts agency. They're going in completely the other direction. And I interviewed, as it happens, both the head of the Kansas, the now defunct Kansas arts agency and then the people in Kansas City, Missouri who were so subsidizing the arts in this really dramatic way on the same day. And I talked to both of them on the same day and it was, it really, it opens your eyes. The thing is that I'm, while I, the people who have, in the state of Kansas with this, they're great distrust for the arts and they're dislike for artists as a class going in the other direction as the rest of America. But they're doing this other thing, right? They cut taxes for a small business down to nothing. I believe it's nothing now. And I believe Koch Industries counts as a small business. I mean, basically anybody can. And they're expecting this to just, they're going to absolutely destroy the economy of Kansas City, Missouri by bringing everybody over to Kansas and then Kansas City, Missouri is like, oh yeah, well we're subsidizing the arts. So, you know, it's a shame to see the arts become a pawn in that sort of game. But at the same time, you do want it to happen. Well, I mean, one of the things is, are we using outdated language? I mean, are we using this binary language and are we actually, there's actually legacy and science and art of a combination with Bell Labs, DOD, ends up bringing in high talent, actually funding. This NASA has funded a lot of development. And I'm not saying it's all, I mean, I don't even know, I'm just throwing it out there because I think that a lot of times we get stuck in this kind of, here's artists, a pro artist, what if you just like, are we moving into an era? The things you just described are these are, when we're living in, we're still living in the age of the untrammeled corporation, whether we like it or not. When you have a leveraged buyout or a corporate takeover, what's the first thing they get rid of? It's always R&D, always. So the things that you just described, this is like, this is what gets pitched, you know. And it's what society always decides it can't afford, is that sort of thing. But then again, you know, look, the 19, I was about to say, no one is really interested in funding, a public funding of some kind of genuinely adversarial project. You know, that's something that you always have, you're always on your own. That's from Outlayers, yeah. Sorry? I mean, that's the definition of Outlayer coming in, right? Yeah, as I've learned, to my cost. But it is interesting that in our society, it's normative, right? We understand and appreciate as a society, whether we agree with the policy or not, that cutting corporate tax rates somehow is gonna have this benefit. You never hear anyone talking. This might go to the language. No one ever says like, maybe artists shouldn't pay taxes, right, I mean like, that would be a direct and quantifiable subsidy. I already tried that, right? There was legislation in Canada that was defeated last week about, for there was giving artists break on taxes as a small business and as a contribution to society, yeah. And American exceptionalism, of course, holds that like, for some reason, we could never... We put artists in jail. We build special prisons for artists. That's what we do here. That's our cultural policy. We should. No. Not compared to most of the world. We actually have a lot of space to move. But it is an interesting thing, thinking in terms of strategy and speaking to the next four years. I bet people have questions. Yes, you know, based on Joel Pomerance and I'm on the board of the Songwriters' Association of Washington. And I just, you know, I hope to run a space right now in Tacoma Park. It's got some organizational issues and probably will be soon closing called The Electric Made. But basically, we have been, our mission was to sort of be a community, a footprint for community development and against gentrification. And whenever we have tried to speak out, people love to come to our artist events and different people from the community and, you know, our music. But when we try to speak out against the gentrification of the neighborhood and the large-scale commercial business that might be displacing the small entrepreneurial stores in the area, it's like crickets chirping, complete silence. We can't get any political traction in the neighborhood and we end up building an enmity towards our space, which I find is very, we're trying to go against the grain and it's a great problem for us. And, you know, I mean, we've had funding, for instance, we had somebody rented our space once for a video. It was the Defense Department and a major defense contractor, SAIC, came in and did a video on problems of military youth and decision-making of teenage military children, but it's only gonna be seen by, like, the children of active duty military, you know? And it's like, no, we will not post that online, even though we made it in your space. Oh, it's like very interesting. Welcome to Washington, D.C. Now, that's an unexplored avenue, right? Where how can you get some alliances with the Pentagon? You know what I'm saying? We have a question in the back. Just a thought sped by the comment about the Canadian changing policy. There are kind of policy obstacles which could be removed to create more space, to create more musical activity, more artistic activity. In the UK, they've recently changed the licensing laws to allow for a greater level of live music. Going into the history of that, you know, live music died in the UK in the 70s or 80s due to licensing that was brought in at that stage, making the physical space constrained and it's better to have DJs rather than real-life people playing. Actions like that could be a great help here. These subsidies in Canada, if you buy an album by a Canadian artist, you'll probably see a grand messier the government Quebec was because they subsidize the production of albums. They have subsidies for touring. Some of these things do exist at the local level here as well, there are Virginia artist touring grants, Maryland touring grants, but they're kind of fairly hidden, they're very partial and specific and you've got to have a PhD in artist grants to be able to even understand the website usually. So there's a few things there which I would love for the future of music coalition or other interested parties to be working on to remove the restrictive policies that do exist already to some extent. That's a great point. Yeah, I would add to that. Got a session. My experience in terms of I founded an all ages performance venue about 12, 13 years ago now and we had to go through obviously insane amounts of licensure and permitting and et cetera from our municipal side of things but where we really ran a muck was ASCAP. And ASCAP decided that the all ages performance venue if we wanted to put sound into the public spaces of the venue including the lobby. Well, the lobby was shared with the United States Postal Service and decided that everyone that came through that lobby was therefore a listener and so instead of having like five people listening to the music which is as an independent alternates place that's pretty good. You had like 5,000 people coming through on a daily basis and that of course meant that our rates were jacked up so it became impossible to not hemorrhage money at that point. And so thus ensued a multi month battle with ASCAP. And so I'm pointing out that in essence a lot of our structures and licensure and et cetera are mixed up and dysfunctional from a variety of different facets or variety of different perspectives. And they clearly need to be radically overhauled if we're going to continue to support arts and cultural fair in the 21st century. I have a question back here. Thanks. For Thomas Frank, I liked your comment about adversarial art not really being funded by patronage, by government at least. So I'm curious if you have any observations on what mechanisms you think are best suited for more adversarial or challenging art you might be able to actually look at the example of punk rock to kind of maybe make a connection. I admit this is a bit of a leading question. You know, I would think of my own experience. It wasn't exactly art, but we did sort of creative journalism, you know, to coin a phrase back in the 90s at the Baffler magazine. We were never subsidized. We never got grant number one, nothing ever. We were, this is gonna make you laugh. I always wondered if it was because of the way I dressed or something like that. But we were never, no one ever thought that we were a boon to the neighborhood. We were in, you know, where Hyde Park is in Chicago. We were one south of that. We were in Woodlawn. No one ever thought that we were a boon to the Woodlawn neighborhood. People thought we were a blight. Yeah. And so maybe it would have been different if I had a different hairdo or something like that. I don't know. I never could figure it out. But at the end of the day, I did, I kept doing what I did. Look, and I can't, I'm not here to cry about it or complain. Things worked out very well for me. I was a columnist at the Wall Street Journal, for God's sakes. Doing, bringing my message of hate and despair to the, you know, and I was subsidized by Rupert Murdoch, you know. So, but the funny thing is that I didn't really, my message did not really change as far as I can tell from the Baffler days to the Rupert Murdoch days. It was the, it was me just doing my same, the same shit. Oh, am I allowed to say that at your conference? No? Excuse me, I'm really sorry about that. So, look, this is something we could talk about for hours and hours and hours. This is a, it's a really involved, complicated subject that I wrote a book in 1997 called The Conquest of Cool about our society's love affair. And I mean by our society, I mean from the top down, from the very wealthy commercial world love affair with outward, the sort of outward signifiers of rebellion, you know, and this has been going on ever since the 1960s, maybe longer than that. But what our society thinks of actual, you know, social critique or really meaningful cultural critique is something completely different. That's something that might succeed on its own merits and might fail, but that no one is gonna subsidize. What are your experiences? Copyright has an important part in it. Yeah, I mean, because you look in journalism, you have to get paid. And look, you're, I've always been torn by this. I want my, what I write to reach the largest possible audience. And in that sense, I, you know, I don't care and I want it to get out there and, you know, let a million websites bloom, right? But on the other hand, I wanna get paid. You know, I have a family, I've gotta make money. You know, I'm a, you know, I have to eat like everybody else. So it's a, you know, this is a huge problem that I can't solve in the remaining 15 seconds left to me by Mr. Bracey here. Sadly, we need to bring this conversation to a close. One thing I will flag, I think one theme I heard from all of you is the need for data and metrics and research and an understanding of how this stuff fits together. And I think one of the things that you chose not to speak to, but I'll take the moment to speak to, is I think the administration in the first term has done a very, very important job and a very interesting job in terms of recognizing the need for data and a deeper understanding of how policies are made across the administration, whether it's transportation policy, education policy, health insurance, urban development, how all those things do have an impact on art and culture and vice versa. That these things are, you know, kind of really deeply connected. And I think we're gonna have a panel later today. We're gonna hear from HUD, we're gonna hear from NEA about kind of what they're doing with research, how they're thinking about this stuff. And hopefully we're moving towards an era where the policy community can really have a deeper understanding and a deeper quantifiable understanding of how this stuff works and the impact that their investments can have in art and culture in ways that are sustainable and not just propping up hipsters, right? Great, thank you guys very much. And we'll be back with the webcast and panel.