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)

rainboflg:

sunspill:

My inbox is closed until further notice

WHAT THE FUCKING HELL IS THIS? WHAT KIND OF LITTLE ASSWIPE HIDES BEHIND A SCREEN AND SPEWS THIS HATEFUL, HURTFUL VERBAL DIARRHIA? BASIC. HUMAN. DECENCY. Is that too much to expect? You, anon, need to reset your moral compass before there’s no part of you even remotely worth salvaging…

I think we had the same anon.

Yes, these ‘people’ exist.  It’s not a joke.  

*Hugs* to you, @sunspill.  Take care.  

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. […] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. […] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture

Marshall McLuhan

geekariffic:

thedoctor-smith:

Wouldn’t it be brilliant if they allowed the stars of these sf/f shows to attend Comic Con in clothes that don’t make them look like misplaced ingenues in La La Land?  

Women: dressed to the nines, dresses, high heels, lots of make-up, clearly selling themselves as well as their show.

Men: here I am in my hat and my t shirt.

Not to shame anyone – I’m sure it’s fun to play dress-up – but this is a business that requires the ladies to look a certain way while not requiring the same of the lads.  It’s classic Hollywood sexism.   If the female stars didn’t have a small army around them telling them what to look like, they’d probably show up in jeans and t-shirts as well and be more comfortable with the crowd instead of being pushed to play above them.  

I saw this quite a bit even at the BBC and the grumbles were profound.  So many young women ‘managed’ to the nth degree, even today, and made to feel grateful for the ‘education.’