FAQ

Since launching, we’ve received thoughtful questions about price, accessibility, our values, and what it means to build towards a worker-owned cooperative. We’re grateful for these questions and want to respond with clarity and care. This FAQ is where we’ll share where we are now, what’s in progress, and how we’re thinking about putting SLD’s values into practice. As we grow, learn and unlearn, we will continue finding ways to share our process with you.

SLD is a collective building electronic instruments, educational resources, and community infrastructure rooted in technological self-determination.

The $1,600 price reflects the reality of small-scale hardware: parts, fabrication, assembly, testing, packaging, prototyping, documentation, design, code, artist collaboration, and the labor of a very small team. It also reflects the larger system we are trying to build around the instrument: workshops, a community space, and infrastructure necessary to build a sustainable cooperative structure.

We are not mass-producing instruments at the scale of a large corporation. We are trying to build carefully, compensate contributors, and avoid making “accessibility” contingent on invisible or underpaid labor and cheap, but extractive practices.

We are actively working toward other ways for people to engage with SLD, including open-source documentation, tutorials, zines, demos, and community education. DIY kits are part of our long-term access strategy, but a good kit requires more than a bag of parts! Our intention is to make as much of the project open and educational as we responsibly can. We believe open documentation is part of demystifying technology.

At the same time, we are still figuring out what exactly will be released, when, and under what license. We need to balance openness with artist consent, sound rights, sustainability, and the fact that SLD is still forming its legal and cooperative structure.

We understand why people are skeptical of political language juxtaposed with selling a product. For SLD, politics is intrinsic to how and why the project exists, how the instruments are designed, who is involved, how sounds are sourced, how we think about labor, and the alternative structures we are trying to build.

We understand that the history of music technology is full of extraction: sounds taken without consent and communities/cultures turned into aesthetics without power, payment, or credit. We do not want to reproduce that. For us, non-extraction means relationship, consent, context, and decision-making power. As we build the sound side of the project, we are exploring ways for artists and collaborators across the Global South to shape the work, like an advisory council.

We are still finalizing the full model but we believe agreements should include equitable and upfront payment terms, clear attribution, usage terms, and future-facing structures like royalties, profit share, contributor pools, or advisory share where possible.

A cooperative is an organization owned and governed by the people it exists to serve. In a worker-owned cooperative, the workers are the owners. They participate in decision-making, share responsibility in the organization, and help determine how value is distributed.

Operating cooperatively is an alternative to traditional capitalism that has been practiced across the globe for centuries, if not longer. For SLD, the co-op model matters because the way we organize ourselves should match the values in the instruments we build. If the work is about shared ownership and resisting extraction, the people doing it should own it and decide together how it runs.

We are still in a process of learning and knowledge sharing around the potential of becoming a worker-owned co-op, and we will share more from this process as we continue building.

SLD is a small collective of artists, musicians, technologists, designers, organizers, and researchers. The project began through Lita’s thesis at NYU and has grown through a wider community contributing instrument design, code, sound, storytelling, cooperative strategy, education, documentation, design, and cultural work.

Meet the collective →

Thank you for pre-ordering and for supporting SLD. By pre-ordering, you’re helping fund our first production run, including the parts, the labor, and the people who build these instruments. This is how small, independent projects like ours bring something into the world.

We’ll keep you close to the process as we move toward fulfillment. Sign up for our newsletter for updates on the build, sound sourcing, and demos along the way. You can expect to receive your instrument in early 2027.

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