Tuesday, November 18, 2014

i feel that people are a little bit confused about this discussion of streaming media, and a lot of it has to do with not understanding the words that are being thrown around.

so, we live under the system we call capitalism. while there are many ways to categorize people in capitalism, the most widely adopted (and most successful, in terms of explanations) way to do this is to broadly split people into workers and capitalists. it's not a clean partition, and it's not exhaustive, but it's fine for the discussion.

simply stated, the workers in a capitalist system are the people that make the goods, whereas the capitalists are the people that own the systems of production and appropriate a profit from the worker's labour, while not producing anything themselves.

now, let us analyze a music distribution system, like spotify. clearly, the musicians are the workers in such a system. and, who are the capitalists? that would be the managers - spotify, google, apple....

and, we see the same thing in this system that we see in every other capitalist system - the capitalists make large profits by exploiting the labour of the workers, while the workers starve.

now, it's pretty blatantly obvious that capitalism is an exploitative system. so, one of the things that anti-capitalists (like socialists and anarchists) seek to do is to gain control of the means of production, so that they don't have to pay the capitalists. anti-capitalists would consequently seek to smash systems like spotify and replace them with artist-run spaces. that is, independent labels and independent artists. bandcamp is not exactly an artist run space, but it's far closer to a socialist model.

the confusion stems from this idea that any process of exchange is upholding capitalism, which is just a misunderstanding of capitalism. capitalism is not exchanging things. there are diverse types of market socialism. capitalism, specifically, is the appropriation of labour by a managerial class. and, the entrenchment of services that stream music for peanuts that are sent to a centralized corporate bureaucracy, while the workers get nothing at all, is one of the most blatantly capitalistic things we've seen happen in our lifetimes.

this confusion is upheld by social norms which seek to trivialize certain economic activities as outside the market. generally, it's "feminine things" that are trivialized in this way - child care, housework, social work and art, to name a few examples.

i hope i've clarified a few things.

time (running out mix)

so, this is going to come in in three parts on the time single, which will be merged into one track on the record.

it's looking like it'll be around 20 minutes, which may be a mild problem when it comes to sequence the disc. but i can't worry about that right now. right now, i've got tons of space on the single...

the third part may end up not on the record. we'll see.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/time-unstuck-mix


this is the first section, which will open up into a remix of the song for the second section. the third section is an idea that will be chaotic, let's see what it sounds like....

written & recorded in late 2001 and early 2002 and mixed in early 2002 and late 2014. the final mix was finished on nov 18, 2014.