Yatú Espinosa: USB Club
Yatú Espinosa: USB Club
A special edition of Naive Weekly
Dear reader
We assume we can access our favourite songs all the time. The same is true with our emails, images and word documents. For each file type, we trust internet platforms to deliver them to us whenever we desire. It is convenient and abundant. Suddenly, our virtual bookshelf competes with the library of Babel.
But how does it change our relationship with media when everything is always available? When we stop creating our own archives, do we become little more than temporary Airbnb tenants in a virtual media metropolis?
I spoke with Yatú from USB Club about why we should carry our digital files on a memory stick. I consider Yatú to be one of the most refreshing internet practitioners. In simple, clever ways, his thoughts reframe how I perceive the world. And since our conversation, I have started to download files again.
With care
Kristoffer
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An Interview with Yatú Espinosa
K: You have a File Man in Europe. You commissioned Elliott Cost to travel around and move files on a USB stick, and in a few weeks, he will visit me here in Athens. But that is not USB Club. Could you help me understand what exactly USB Club is?
Yatú: Oh, it is USB Club.
K: File Life is USB Club? But the files Elliott carries around don’t get uploaded to the USB Club app? They stay with Elliott and get deleted by the end of his tour.
Yatú: Yeah, but USB Club didn't start with an app…
K: No. It started with a party…
Yatú: We kicked off our journey by renting out these cool pirate studio rooms. For hours, we had all these CDJs that used USBs as an inventory key that people could use, and it turned out a lot of folks wanted to play and learn. I ended up telling everyone to bring a USB. It kind of became my catchphrase. After telling maybe the twelfth person to get one, we realised we were onto something. However, not everyone needs to be a DJ to have fun with USBs. So we started throwing parties where we told people to bring their USBs. People brought all different types of files. We put them all in a folder and shared the files back. It had interesting network effects. It was a kind of file potluck.
Are you familiar with the term sneakernet?
K: Sneakernet? Like where people sell sneakers?
Yatú: No, actually it's on Wikipedia, and you can look it up. It's a way to move files with your feet.
K: Ah, that's amazing.
Yatú: That's what Elliott is doing.
K: That's so cool. A real file transfer.
Yatú: Yeah, exactly. So this is USB Club. It started as a sneakernet, and has infrastructure that also works with the internet. It's just a file delivery system at this point, a file transit system.
K: But why did you then decide to make an app and create a digital space for it?
Yatú: Oh, just to share and stay connected with people. We've also created other things. We've created this thing called an ATM, short for Automatic Transfer Machine, where you can plug in your USB and get files by attending a specific event and then a receipt comes out. Almost like a point-of-sale system, but instead of money it's data. And you get a receipt of the files you got as well as being able to see all the people who also have USBs who were at that event or other events. You know, at its core, the medium is the message.
K: I love it. You did this at FWB Fest, right?
Yatú: Yeah, that one was really cool. We had a two-hour window on the first day. We were distributing content from the artists at the festival. And then, on that same day, we told anybody who wanted to contribute files to bring them for an expansion pack for the next day like the original file potluck party. So the next day, we had the original artist files and the community expansion pack. And this was all done with the ATM. That's offline.
K: It’s an expanding network. How do you join the USB Club? I see there is a waitlist. If you’re invited, you pay the money, and then you receive a USB. Is that it?
Yatú: No, if you have a USB, you're already in USB Club.
K: So if you have any USB, you can come to any of your events or your ATM and plug it in?
Yatú: Yeah.
K: Okay, I love that. It's an open protocol.
Yatú: Yeah, web zero.
K: And the app itself, could you also access that?
Yatú: What about it? What do you want to know?
K: Can you download the app without an original USB Club USB stick?
Yatú: For now, it's only for the USB Club USBs because social trust is important. We want to ensure that we're creating something meaningful rather than just opening up the floodgates. The point that USBs create is intentionality; it makes you think about what you're putting on it. There's an intentional curatorial layer that goes into it all. USBs are simple hardware, and we just create great experiences with simple hardware. With the app, it's not like we want to grow overnight into whoever has a USB. We could do that, but I think it really starts with connecting people who care to be connected. It's about creating meaningful connections, not how big something can become overnight. I mean, it's possible, but how long would it last?
K: Have you spoken with any USB Club carriers about how they see their behaviour change?
Yatú: Yeah. I talk to people about it all the time.
K: So what changes? Does anyone become a protector of specific files? Are there certain things people carry with them to say that they are the ones who will make sure that all menus from the Lower East Side are carried on a stick? Are there certain unexpected behaviours?
Yatú: Yeah, one interesting insight is that the file types you carry say a lot about you. They are personality types. In this way, the USB allows identity formation to happen. That's a beautiful thing. Mine has mostly film photos. I have friends who have only 3D files. What would it mean to connect all the people who carry 3D files? There are all these file types, PDFs, e-books, apps, etc., without a home to be socialised outside of a business context.
K: Are there any non-human entities that have a USB Club stick? Like a street, river, or wall?
Yatú: There's this one place called Temperance Alley Garden in Washington, D.C., that has turned the ATM into a time capsule. In this garden, so many special rituals and moments happen among locals, and they use the time capsule to store the information. For example, some people from the neighbourhood could do a performance there and record it. Then, right after the performance, they put it in the time capsule and others can later plug in their USB to get a copy of the music.
K: That's beautiful. What subcultures inspire USB Club?
Yatú: Well, it started with DJing. DJs use USBs to use their auxiliary hardware device of a CDJ. But now I'm really inspired by people who carry the USBs with them, whether it's on their necklace or keychain or whatever. I'm particularly interested in intergenerational data and what that means. I think there's also a funny joke here about how the crypto phase was inspired by network mechanics and ownership. And how this infrastructure already exists; we just have to augment it a little bit.
I'm also really inspired by people who do folder poetry with their files and the phenomenon of a memory palace. On my USB, I have a folder for mail. Friends leave files in the mailbox. And then I go through the front door. There's the TV. I have videos in the TV folder. I can go out and continue to the table where some PDFs are lying around. I go to the closet. There's a suitcase that's a zip file. It goes on and on. It's been a way to acquaint myself with what I own in this agonist world of files, and to protect it. That's the responsibility that comes with ownership. I think once you just give your files away to the cloud and expect them to be there all the time, then you expect ownership without the responsibility. People might think they own it, but they're just paying someone else to take care of it. And at that point, they're just renting. A lot of times people may be deterred because what if something happens to their files? Well, what if your house burns down? You know, you’ve just got to take care of it. And sometimes things happen that are outside our control, and you can choose to do things. You can get another device or just put it on the cloud to back it up if you really care that much.
USB Club ties your identity to a device by asking people to identify what they care about. I think people have forgotten how to do that. They have so many files on their laptop, and they can't tell which ones are the most important to them.
K: I think it's impressive if people still have a lot of files on their laptops. Manufacturers make laptops with less and less memory. Today, everything is in the cloud. We don't carry files with us anymore, we carry links to them. In terms of inspiration, USB Club also reminds me of P2P file sharing and ownership. But it’s not ownership in the speculation sense you see with house prices and crypto-waves. It's a different kind of ownership. It's more like caretaking.
Yatú: Yeah, we call it preserving. It's preserving files.
K: That seems to point to the past, though.
Yatú: How so? Say more.
K: Well, if you preserve something, you also kind of maintain it in whatever status it was. Of course, USB Club plays on nostalgia, but I don't see it as something that only aims to preserve a society or a thing as it was. You allow things to be remixed and transformed into other things by transferring files between people.
Yatú: Yeah. I mean it in the sense of maintaining or keeping alive, like preserving a memory or quality. Like what about all the files that are on the Internet? You can remix them and change them. They're malleable. They're modifiable. You can modify the ownership. You can modify your home. You can do a renovation. But I think it's more about the unique content that exists outside the internet. People may jump to illegal use cases, but there are also personal things, like letters, PDFs, and images. For example, our parents and grandparents may have physical photo albums. Our generation has Instagram… but now we have USBs. My mom tells me to put my medical records there. I listen to her. Now I have my MRIs on my USB.
K: It's the most logical and low-tech approach. It doesn't consume energy once it's in your pocket. You don't need to charge it…
Yatú: No battery…
K: Let’s return to how exactly it works. How do you currently discover files with USB Club?
Yatú: There are many ways to discover files. There's the true human-to-human way: “Oh, you have a USB too? What do you have on it?,” where people can share immediately. With the new iPhone, you can even plug in your USB and go through the files. I like to do it in the subway when there's no signal. And you can share those files as well. Another layer is the ATMs that we have around the world. We've done them in Japan, Paris, New York, and Idyllwild, California. And those are files that the host can distribute to their audience as digital and physical souvenirs. So another way to find files is at events you care enough about to go to.
We're also experimenting with desktop and mobile applications, where, right now, you can share one file per day. The files go away at midnight, so you have until midnight to preserve them. People crate dig locally on their computers to choose what they want others to preserve. When someone shares a file, a copy is made onto their USB. So it's not like Instagram or any other social platform where you don't actually own what you post. In USB Club, when you share something, you own it.
K: Is something else branching out from USB Club? And how do you think about all these experiments growing out of the project? I guess it’s not like in Pokemon where one evolution substitutes the next. Rather, these experiments coexist like new nodes in the network.
Yatú: The way I see it is that there's been an infrastructure underneath our nose the whole time. I'm really fascinated by networks and augmenting these networks to be meaningful. Unrelated, my friends and I connected a bunch of spaces in New York City and started a fellowship program called a Campus Complex. That's just another form of augmenting environments. Instead of creating a new building, we created a campus with existing infrastructure. With this experience, I asked myself, how many USB ports are around me all the time? There are so many, and now that the USB-C is becoming the common denominator, it's even making it more useful. What these USBs, in particular, do is communicate; they create a bridge between internets.
K: The potential seems endless…
Yatú: I try my best to foresee that. That's why I doubled down on USB Club to be an artefact that will take a while to see the extent of because it allows for so much artistic expression. There's an infra aspect that we don't see that ascribes meaning to the interconnectedness of these devices that store memory. And if, like me, you're fascinated by network effects, you can't always see them, but you can sense them. You can also imagine them. And that's really at the core. Because we know all the convenient alternatives. Why is there a fascination for something that has more friction? Well, with the rise of convenience, we lost rituals. You don't even have to cook anymore. You can just order it to your door. And it's like in an age where media is being skewed, where do we look to find originality in media? When everything is on the Internet, how do we form identity off of it? What's our offline identity? That's a forever question. But me gathering an inventory of items that I care about and identify with helps me form my identity without the complete dependency on the Internet. I go and plug the stick into my phone or anything that reads USBs and I go through my files. Just like a book. Just like everyone in their home has a section for their books. Back to the memory palace. Everyone used to have DVDs and CDs put away. But now we have streaming. The cost of convenience is the loss of the ritual aspect of things. And those rituals have meaning. And I think if we go further towards the convenience where there is no friction, then we don't make choices anymore. Then we're just consuming. I think USBs force people to make choices. And those choices define you. And that's what's beautiful about it.
Follow Yatú on Are.na, Instagram or Twitter. On the Are.na USB Club channel you can find pictures of the ATMs, receipts and USB Club parties mentioned in the interview. And if you want to join the club, visit https://usb.club and fill out the waitlist.
Thanks for reading this special edition of Naive Weekly. And thank you to Brian and Hester for advising my journey into the world of interviews.