The ostensible premise behind social media platforms is to enable people to connect online, but this gets jeopardized by their attention economy architecture and paid advertising algorithms. Today’s guests are Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Jared Geller and they join us to speak about their platform, HitRecord, an online community built around creative collaboration. HitRecord offers artists of all kinds a platform to share their artwork or idea, and open it up to the input of other artists, thereby producing a trail that records the work’s progression much like GitHub does with code. In our conversation with Joseph and Jared, we hear about HitRecord’s journey from its early days as a production company to its current state as a tech company, offering decentralized access and editing capabilities to creative projects around the world. Our guests talk about some of the functionality on HitRecord and weigh in on some of the limitations of social media. We also explore the future of the movie industry, the blurring lines between creativity and technology, and what kinds of creative and community-driven art forms could grow out of quarantine and the pandemic.

Make sure to check out their latest project “Create Together #WithMe”, a new Youtube series about making art and community out of uncertain times.

“HitRecord is a community built around creative collaboration. HitRecord, it’s less about, ‘Look at what I made,’ and it’s more about, ‘What can we make together?”

Key Points From This Episode:

• Introducing HitRecord, an online community built around creative collaboration
• Collaboration versus likes: connecting online differently to what social media allows
• Open-source culture: drawing from GitHub and Lawrence Lessig’s Remix for HitRecord
• Similarities between a software developer and an artist mindset
• The rules around attribution on HitRecord
• How the scope of projects made on HitRecord has grown and thoughts for its future
• The role technology played in making HitRecord’s contribution process more decentralized
• The value to be found by seeing and experiencing the process behind creative works
• Taking YouTube’s enablement of getting seen further by foregrounding the creative process
• Problem-solving using data versus emotion: the merge between tech and creative mindsets
• Hollywood’s heyday in the 1930s and the evolution of the movie industry
• The increased use of HitRecord in the pandemic
• TikTok’s genesis story and the pros and cons of the platform: music versus monetization
• The double-edged sword of new tech that become invisible but indispensable
• Lesser-known Joseph Gordon-Levitt films to watch during the quarantine