But the lesson to take away from the SoundCloud crisis isn’t just that creative businesses are difficult to sustain online, or that the company wasn’t quick enough to find a lasting revenue stream. It’s that as we move creative scenes from cities and neighborhoods and onto the web, we outsource the publishing, storage, and archiving of their products to young, for-profit businesses — and therefore run the very serious risk of losing huge and important libraries of culture to the vagaries of a new and quickly moving economy.
Thinking about SoundCloud it’s hard not to be reminded of Vine, the hugely influential video-sharing app that was unceremoniously shut down by Twitter last year: Not only did the web lose one of its most vibrant spaces, any videos that disappeared from the service were gone forever. It’s not an accident, either, that, like Vine, SoundCloud’s culture is primarily steered by non-white contributors.
The Death of SoundCloud Should Scare Music Lovers, Vulture
There is a lot to talk about here but it is 1am in the morning so main thoughts:
1. is it just me or is this type of loss accelerating?
2. hadn’t thought about vine stars being poc, but huh. that is some literal erasure
(via odditycollector)
I feel like a lot of the stuff we do with the internet makes more sense as a utility since there really isn’t a profit-model for it.
Like, Uber/Lyft -using the internet to find Taxis on-demand- is a great idea, but neither company is profitable, and their business plan is literally to float by burning investment capital to cover their operating losses in the hopes of eventually achieving a global monopoly position in taxi services, which they can then abuse by jacking up ride rates and crushing driver-payments monstrously to manipulate the business into being profitable. This is Stupid as a business plan -and predicated on eventually establishing an unfree market ruled by illegal behavior so philosophically and legally contradictory as well(not that any of this matters to the Business Class)- but as a public one, run off of publicly owned servers and accessible to everyone who goes through the classes and pays the fees to be qualified as a taxi driver, it’d be a great idea; it wouldn’t even need to be entirely tax-funded, you could tack a surcharge onto rides found through the service, or require a usage fee from operators, which would go to maintaining it.
Same with Vine or SoundCloud or Youtube or Amazon or Search Engines or just the internet in general, really. All of these are great ideas, all of them are super-useful, and all of them are either damndably difficult to profitize, or their utility is undermined by profitizing them(Google and data-mining, for instance. Also questionably legal, regardless of the pragmatist decisions handed down by pro-business US courts), or they can only be profitable via illegal operation(Amazon, for instance, runs on monopoly-power and violating labor laws, and much of its operating costs are actually carried by its “last mile” vendor, the US Postal Service. Which is to say: Taxpayers). The Internet, and it’s various uses, are clearly Public Goods, and they ought to be publicly owned and maintained like any public good, and they would be, if they hadn’t been invented(by various government research projects, let’s remember) during a time when “Privatization” was all the rage in political circles as a result of Conservatives realizing they could hijack the socially-taught racism of white voters post Civil Rights Era to undermine support for government action and regulated capitalism in Eurostates(or Post-Colonial-Immigration Era in Britain. Thatcher’s election had a hell of a lot more to do with white Brits pissed off about Caribbean and Indian neighbors than any sincere preference for laissez faire economic philosophies within the electorate).
(via zenosanalytic)
QueerAnarchism 