Is This Thing On?
Bhavik Singh, Christopher Clary, Molly Soda, Sarah Rothberg
Livestreaming is a hundred billion dollar, global industry owned and controlled by Big Tech. Although streamers create the core value of these platforms, they/we have little agency, from how streams appear to how profits are shared, terms of service, and what social agreements exist between audience and streamers.
“Is this THING on?” is a livestreaming network for artists, and an experiment in software development as performance art.
The central question we explored while part of the C/Change R&D lab was: how – and more importantly why – would a network like ours exist within the framework of “decentralization”?
To answer this, our approach was to progressively “decentralize” across a series of seasons: performances + public salons that would determine the next iteration of THING.
THING is a cooperative project by Molly Soda, Christopher Clary, soft networks, Sarah Rothberg, Semi Anonymous Friend and you?
Check out the prototype here.
Concept
Process
THING is being decentralized slowly with care across 3 seasons where each builds upon the last using research > dev > performance > public debriefs.
Season 0
We initially planned to start at Season 1, but building our own centralized platform felt like we were moving too fast. We decided to instead move backwards, and began at Season 0 — using the opportunity to explore existing platforms and tap into our feelings about them: what would we want to change about these existing platforms?
We completed Season 0, our investigation into current livestream platforms, in late October. From the rehearsals, performance, and salon we were able to feel and document how Big Tech silos us, including how this impacted the presentation of our streams on the THING website. For instance, YouTube, Chaturbate, and Twitch all blocked us from embedding their site on our own site with an overlay of our THING controls.
Going forward, we hope to make our platform ui/ux more communal — we want to feel connected. After our first experiment, we had a debrief among ourselves to discuss. Conclusions were that the pros of using these existing channels were that we were able to access our already existing audiences — however the drive towards thing.tube for those viewers was low, so we got few “crossover” viewers. In a way, this ‘webring’ version of our site felt somewhat decentralized, to the extent that it was isolating us: streamers were not in touch with each other, and our audiences weren’t moving betweens streams.
Season 1
We launched thing.tube as a centralized network in early November and have been testing and fixing “bugs” in public as part of our rehearsals. To address the communal goals from Season 0, we created a global chat that appears in all rooms and the home page can display every stream at once with audio on, like a cam2cam Zoom call. We plan to devote the first and/or last five minutes of each performance to being present on the home page, so performers can talk to each other and the audience. The tech in each stream is somewhat standardized (each has a chat, stickers, buttons, etc.), reflecting the limits of centralization – a central codebase can only do so much.
Mollly’s room will be collaboratively cleaned by the audience, Bhavik is maintaining a garden while maintaining the code-base of THING, Chrisy will be stickered with reactions that grow over time on a page that you can scroll around to explore Chrisy’s body, Sarah – as an avatar in a private metaverse – will try to come up with some answers for your questions.
Season 2 and beyond
As of this writing, we’re about to do our final performance for Season 1, followed by a public salon debrief, which would lead us into Season 2: decentralization.
We’ve finally had to face the question: what does decentralization even mean? What are we decentralizing? Are we decentralized already?
We’ve landed on a few key principles and distinctions, which we hope to eventually publish, but at present remain a jumble of floating ideas (if you’re interested, they’re here: Thing + Web3).
At the start of the project, we felt quite clear that we wanted to work in three Seasons: Season 1, 2 and 3 – progressively decentralizing and growing at each stage. We were excited about adding new artists at each stage, using decentralized technologies (Web 1.0 or Web 3.0), and growing an artist powered live streaming platform.
As the project kicked off and we began to spend time together we began to question this clarity. In each conversation, we interrogated our assumptions: why were we building a platform? Who is it for? What is the purpose of decentralization anyway?. We felt called to not root in languages of technical systems and capitalism, but instead our motivations as artists: connection, expression, exploration, experimentation.
These reflections encouraged us to slow down further, and interrogate before creating anything. An example of this slow, careful process was adding Season 0: where we live streamed on existing platforms, to understand their constraints before we began to create our own.
Our process became the art itself. Though publicly people are coming to the streams for an hour at a time, we spent 100’s of hours together and experienced what it means to decentralize as an artist collective. The most critical things that were decentralized were not APIs and code, but more abstract notions: conversation, intention, decision making, collaboration, and more.