Bandcamp is a group enterprise which is constructed out of the work of around 60 people or so.
None of those employees actually *own* the enterprise though, the enterprise's ownership is abstracted away from membership of the group of people that make Bandcamp work.
Which means the owners, without consulting with the members of the group, can sell the group to other owners.
And that is indeed what has happened.
The new owners of the group are likely to insist that the members of the group enshitify their service and impoverish themselves and their customers.
This is capitalism: The abstraction of the ownership and control of a group enterprise to make it separate from membership of the group itself.
The boss's bosses ain't in the group, and they don't care about the mission or the music or the bands.
They only care about return on investment.
The only way to prevent capital from selling out your group enterprise is to never let capital own the group enterprise in the first place.
Try to work for co-ops, and if you are a worker or musician at Bandcamp, maybe just quit and start something that isn't owned by money.
This is actually pretty weird. Can you imagine trying to explain it to an alien?
So the people that work there can just be sacked and the whole org shut down without their consultation?
And the people who use the service don't need to be consulted either?
The only people who are seen as having an interest in the group enterprise are a bunch of share-holders of a different enterprise who decided to sell them?
Capitalism is actually utterly mad.
This is the thing which made much of the modern world possible: You can abstract ownership over a group project in order to fund that group project.
We can club in together to fund the bulding of a bridge, or a school, or a bomb, or whatever.
And that's great.
But what proportion of the ownership of group enterprise should go to the people who fund, own, and then charge rent on it?
And what proportion to the people who actually do the work?
Why do they get to decide who owns it, and the 60 people who work there and the thousands of bands who use it get fucking jack shit say about anyting at all?
That is what capitalism is: The ownership of the means of production by those fuckers who are doing nothing but charging rent.
Free markets mean driving that out, not encouraging it.
There are other ways to fund enterprise than giving 100% of all control and ownership to the fuckers that fund it.
And while I'm ranting about ownership of the means of production: Here's one nobody much thinks about. Ownership of the means of indexing.
The actual namespace, the search, the placement in the default global index.
Who should own that?
Should it be the highest bidder?
Google allow scams and fraudsters in the top two so often I can no longer reassure my mum that the app-stores are safe.
And the app-stores are already the means of digital distribution: The namespace, the search.
Who should own the index, and what should count to rank it? That's as important now as who owns the factory and gets to boss the workers ever was.
And of course it's so obvious it hardly feels like a mention but:
The reason you won't hear the corporate-owned media discuss the legitimacy of corporate-ownership-of-media is because... Duh...
Come on now, you can get it. Think. Think! Why would corporate owned media be reluctant to report on the problems of corporate ownership?
Duhhh..
@pre "Mad" is a terribly polite way of putting it.
@conniptions I'm sure you already know that the only cannon copy of your music should be on your own hard-drive. Your only copy isn't there on their servers.
Hope the buy-out turns out good for you and everyone, but then not much of what I hope for actually happens.
@pre Oh yes, for sure, and not just backed up seven ways to Sunday but also, finally, the answer to the question, "why did I still do CDs last time around". There's extra redundant offsite backup for you :)
As for what's will happen, I've been expecting an eventual enshittification of BC for a long time now: let's hope I'm as wrong now as I was when Epic bought it, but also, realistically, let's choose now to stare very hard at things like this (by @fluffy I think) too:
@conniptions
Good. My off-site backups are actually finally where I want them thanks to finding rclone .
It's so fucking much data though.
I can understand why indebted tech under high interest rates will just delete it. Tempting to just delete it myself really for some of the older shitter stuff.
We have to try to avoid anything owned by capital in any way. The end of capitalism can be entirely bloodless, we just need to stop giving them money and give it instead to cooperatively owned enterprises.
@pre Preach etc.
You will have already seen the excellent Small Things Manifesto, yes?
https://ajroach42.com/the-small-things-manifesto/
(by @ajroach42 )
I love AJ (hai). There's a lot of his in the to-read list.
Own your platform! There we can definitely all agree.
The web wasn't supposed to be how it ended up being but it can still be fixed.
Almost fits my views. With some caveats. I see "small" not as replacement for national/global, but as a serious potential for economic and cultural counterweight. I reject all "us vs them" rhetoric. And I do not like imagery of tribal structures which seem to be hailed in the manifesto - I rather prefer small number of carefully curated contacts and personal time across widespread and intertwined networks.
Also: When Iron Source bought Unity I had a quick look at Godot to see if it would do, and it looked like probably it wouldn't.
Since then Godot released version 4, Unity enshitified their terms of service, and I was told of the existence of Monado!
I am so much happier with the entire project now I know it can have a fully open entire-stack. And I might never have to boot into Windows again!
And the software I'm writing is better not only because anything is better 2nd time around but also because Godot actually is better in some ways that requires now fewer horrible hacks and workarounds.
Boycott Capitalism is a thing we can actually do in the software world at least.
[Edit: Iron Source bought Unity, not Epic, bad spelling of Monado]
@pre Ha.
I have no choice but to deal with Unity things at work, alas, for now.
But for me, in terms of Engine That Does All The Things I Need, Godot has been it since I discovered it.
Filing away Monando in case I ever want to do that kind of thing also, ta.
@conniptions The thing about Monando is that on Windows my VR rig used to stutter. Just like drop one frame below 90 fps every second or so.
The graph on the SteamVR debug-window looked like ..|.....|.....|....
I actually think Monando on Linux though X is doing better. The stutter is gone.
Nothing other than Godot seems to support it in any way at all. I have failed at getting any games to run though it what so ever.
But my own code is suttering less now on the free systems.
@pre @conniptions for anyone else confused, it's apparently spelled Monado, and only Adam has search engine hits for this alternative spelling.
Heh, thanks. I seem to have misspelled in in my source directory and startup scripts too.
My name is better I reckon ;)
@conniptions Blamscamp is by @suricrasia. I'm responsible for pyBlamscamp, an automated encoding and tagging thing that also builds a bundle that uses the player from Blamscamp for easy embedding on webpages and distribution on platforms such as itch.io. It's at https://github.com/fluffy-critter/pyBlamscamp but I totally understand (and am somewhat responsible for) your confusion. @pre
@conniptions @pre Which is to say, Blamscamp is a really nice thing, but it doesn't handle any encoding or tagging, and pyBlamscamp exists to make that easier (as well as the process for actually provisioning the album onto itch.io).
I really should have given it a different name.
@conniptions @pre I think my thinking in the moment was that I was forking blamscamp to give it an alternate set of functionality that I felt was missing from the original. That still doesn't justify not renaming it though.
@fluffy @conniptions @pre you renaming it was totally justified imo, it's pretty common to change the name of something when you port it to another language. iirc I licensed everything as cc0 for this reason, I want the code to be used!
@fluffy @conniptions @pre wait you said *not* renaming it. tbh I feel like adding "py" at the start is sufficient
@pre @conniptions it's time for a fedified #bandcamp clone.
@pre i wish the workers got together and bought it to be honest.
@maloki wouldn't that be nice.
We're building a co-operatively run alternative: https://jam.coop. Owned by musicians and the people who build it, it'll never be sold. Sign up to find out more.
Excellent.
My musical skills are barely worth inflicting upon others at all, and certainly not worth trying to ask for money, but for the good musicians out there this seems like a good lead ^^^