March 2, 2022: Bandcamp puts out a press release about their “joining” Epic Games. This follows in a line of eerily similar acquisitions of companies catering to indies, namely Sketchfab and ArtStation.

There are lots of interesting topics intersecting here:

• Venture capital and the associated perverse incentives
• Antitrust and general issues with corporate consolidations
• The takeover of existing institutions, especially technical infrastructure
• The false narrative of corporations as indie and non-corporate
• Epic vs Apple and problems of platform monopoly
• Bandcamp’s correct but rare approach to piracy, which is endangered

I’ll talk more about those some day, don’t worry. For now, though, have some tweets.

badidea 🪐@0xabad1dea

the problem with making a good website is that sooner or later someone will offer you an un-refusable amount of money to ruin it twitter.com/Bandcamp/statu…

Wed Mar 02 18:04:16 +0000 2022

Twitter is an ephemeral medium. You scroll through tweets just fast enough for them to register in your head, and then they’re gone forever. If you want to find something again, you can go to somebody’s profile and scroll through, one tweet at a time, until you find what you wanted.

This is a lousy way of capturing history. That’s not great, because Twitter does such a good job of capturing important moments, as they happen. If you want to save that moment, though, what can you do? What do you do if you think a day’s tweets are important? Print them out?

Well, I did. Here is what I tweeted and retweeted, on a page. Tactile. To be read.

gio :⁾@giovan_h

i wonder what will happen

Fri Jan 01 00:21:56 +0000 2021