A platform is telling researchers how to study its neutrality and defining what and where researchers should look to evaluate it. If it was Google or Facebook we might be shocked. But it’s from Wikipedia, and so this move will undoubtedly go unnoticed by most. On Thursday this week, the Wikimedia Foundation’s research team sent a note to the Wikimedia research mailing list asking for feedback on their “Guidance for NPOV Research on Wikipedia” [1]. The Wikimedia Foundation is the US-based non-profit organisation that hosts Wikipedia and its sister projects in the Wikimedia stable of websites. The move follows increased threats against the public perception of Wikipedia’s neutrality e.g. by Elon Musk who has accused it of bias and a “leftward drift”, sometimes referring to it as “Wokepedia” [2]. And threats to its core operating principles (e.g. that may require the WMF to collect ages or real names of editors) as governments around the world move to regulate online platforms [3].

The draft guidelines advise us on how we should study Wikipedia’s neutrality, including where we should look. The authors write that “Wikipedia’s definition of neutrality and its importance are not well understood within the research community.” In response, they tell us Neutral Point of View on Wikipedia doesn’t necessarily mean “neutral content” but rather “neutral editing”. They also argue that editing for NPOV on Wikipedia “does not aim to resolve controversy but to reflect it”. There is only one way to reflect a controversy, apparently, and that is the neutral way. In this, they seem to be arguing that researchers should evaluate Wikipedia’s neutrality according to its own definition of neutrality – a definition that absolves the site, its contributors and the organisation that hosts it from any responsibility for the (very powerful) representations it produces.

The guidelines tell researchers what are the “most important” variables that shape neutrality on Wikipedia (and there we were thinking that which were the most important was an open research question). What is missing from this list is interesting… particularly the omission of the Wikimedia Foundation itself. In a separate section titled “The Role of the Wikimedia Foundation”, we are told that the Wikimedia Foundation “does not exercise day-to-day editorial control” of the project. The WMF is merely “a steward of Wikipedia, hosting technical infrastructure and supporting community self-governance.” As any researcher of social organisation will tell you, organisations that support knowledge production *always* shape what is represented – even when they aren’t doing the writing themselves.

From my own perspective as someone who has studied Wikipedia for 15 years and supported Wikipedia as an activist in the years prior to this, I’ve seen the myriad ways in which the Foundation influences what is represented on Wikipedia. To give just a few examples: the WMF determines how money flows to its chapters and to research, deciding which gaps are filled through grants and which are exposed through research. It is the only real body that can do demographic research on Wikipedia editors – something it hasn’t done for years (probably because it is worried that the overwhelming dominance of white men from North America and Western Europe would not have changed). Understanding who actually edits Wikipedia could trigger changes that prioritise a greater diversity of editors. The WMF decides what actions (if any) it will take against the Big Tech companies that use its data contrary to license obligations. It decides when it will lobby governments to encourage or oppose legislation. Recognising that the WMF employees don’t edit Wikipedia articles doesn’t preclude an understanding that it plays a role in deciding how subjects are represented and how those representations circulate in the wider information ecosystem.

Finally, the guidelines are also prescriptive in defining what researchers’ responsibilities are. Not surprisingly, our responsibilities are to the Wikipedia and Wikimedia community who “must” have research shared with them in order for research about Wikipedia’s neutrality to have impact. We are told to “Always share back with the Wikimedia research community” and are provided with a  list of places, events and forums where we should tell editors about our research. In conclusion, we’re told that we must always “communicate in ways that strengthen Wikipedia”.

“As a rule of thumb, we recommend that when communicating about your research you ask yourself the question “Will this communication make Wikipedia weaker or stronger?” Critiques are valued but ideally are paired with constructive recommendations, are replicable, leave space for feedback from Wikimedians, and do not overstate conclusions.”

There is no room for those who think perhaps that Wikipedia is too dominant, that it is too close to Big Tech and American interests to play such an important role in stewarding public knowledge for all the world. Nor for those whose research aims to serve the public rather than Wikipedia editors, those of us who choose rather to educate the public when, how and why Wikipedia fails to live up to its promise of neutrality and the neutrality we have mistakenly come to expect from it. I know that this request for feedback from the WMF will not raise an eyebrow in public discourse about the project and that will be the sign that we have put too much expectation in Wikipedia’s perfection, perhaps because if Wikipedia is found wanting, if the “last best place on the internet” [4] has failed, then the whole project has failed. But for me, it is not a failure that Wikipedia is not neutral. The failure is in the dominance of an institution that is so emboldened by its supposed moral superiority that it can tell us – those who are tasked with holding this supposedly public resource – to account what the limits of that accounting should be.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Guidance_for_NPOV_Research_on_Wikipedia
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/elon-musk-also-has-a-problem-with-wikipedia
[3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2025/06/27/the-wikipedia-test/
[4] https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-online-encyclopedia-best-place-internet/

(legacy-tribute-revival posting of INC’s 2010 Critical Point of View network)

In the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, Ryan Coogler has a vampire story to tell. But before he can begin, he needs to tell another story—a blues one. Sinners opens with a voiceover thesis statement performed by Wunmi Mosaku (who plays Annie in the film—more on her below) about the work the blues can do, then rambles the narrative through and around 1932 Clarksdale, eventually settling into a juke joint outside of town. Here, the blues story builds to a frenzied climax, ultimately conjuring the vampires propelling the film’s second half. It’s those vampires that most immediately register as cinematic spectacle, but Coogler’s impetus to film in IMAX and leverage all of his professional relationships for the movie wasn’t the monsters—it was to showcase the blues at a scale the music deserves. In Sinners, the blues takes center stage as a generative sonic practice, sound that creates space to be and to know in the crevices of the material world, providing passage between oppression and freedom, life and death, past and future, and good and evil.

I’m not exaggerating in calling the opening voiceover a thesis. In a movie where Coogler trusts his audience with a great deal of interpretation, he puts an incredibly fine point on the role that blues performs here. We’re told that some musicians—be they Irish, West African, Native American, or southern US Black—are so skilled that they can pierce the veil separating the living from the dead, and while this piercing can help heal a community, it can also attract a certain evil that wants to exploit this rupture. The narrator doesn’t say “It’s the blues!” but the next visual information we get is that it’s Clarksdale, MS, in 1932, and an injured, blood-soaked Sammie (Miles Caton) is stumbling into his father’s church, clutching what’s left of the neck of a guitar. No one in Sinners says the word “crossroads,” but here we are, at the place where the blues meets the devil—where the end meets the beginning–and our young hero has a choice about which way he’s going to go.

If Coogler doesn’t fully trust his audience to know what to do with the blues without being told, it’s likely due to decades of commercialized attempts to defang the genre that have filtered out 21^st century listeners’ ability to hear most of what makes the blues potent.  Drawing on what Clyde Woods in Development Arrested (1998) has termed the “blues epistemology,” a blues way of knowing, B Brian Foster speaks with contemporary Black Clarksdalians in I Don’t Like the Blues (2020) to chart much of the current state of the blues. Pulling on one particular thread of Foster’s ethnography can help clarify what’s happening in Sinners, as he unpacks the many reasons why the blues don’t resonate quite like they used to.

In Woods’s framework, the blues is more than a musical genre; it’s a way of understanding and, crucially, reshaping one’s world. The blues, a genre arising in the late 19^th century and reverberating through the 20^th, functioned as epistemology in order to explore a way out from under plantation power after Reconstruction and through Jim Crow. Woods chronicles centuries of “plantation power” in the Delta and how that power reconfigures itself over and again through different eras of US history, always with the goal of extracting labor and life from Black Mississippians. The blues pushed against the edge of what was considered possible and sought to imagine and create a world that was free—not just from plantation power but from all the logics that support it or would circumscribe Black self-determination and autonomy.  In I Don’t Like the Blues, Foster encapsulates the heart of blues epistemology with a flourish: “While many people hear the blues as performance and play, Black residents of Clarksdale knew it to be flesh and bone, a spirit in the dirt. Their blues was a conduit. A map. A method” (15-16). Throughout his book, Foster demonstrates that what the blues was is no longer what the blues is. One of those reasons is that resistance to plantation power (whether in the Delta or beyond) simply sounds different now, having worked its way through jazz and funk and soul and hip hop and trap. 

In Sinners, Coogler starts by telling us what the blues could do, then he shows us that power in a climactic scene midway through the film, reminding his audience that a blues epistemology might not always sound the same, but it can still do the work of mapping out freedom. After the camera cuts away from Sammie at the crossroads in his church, we loop a bit back in time to meet Sammie’s cousins, the SmokeStack brothers (twins played by Michael B Jordan), who purchase the juke joint’s eventual location.  The first half of the movie follows the brothers as they split up and get the band—and hospitality crew—together to open the venue that night. Sammie is new to this life, but a deeply gifted bluesman, and he receives counsel along the way about what the music is and how it works. Once the juke is packed, the booze is flowing, and the dancefloor is sweating, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) invites Sammie to take the stage and tell the people who he is and where he’s from. What follows is an ambitious narrative and technical feat that pays off the opening voiceover.

Sammie, also known as Preacher Boy, launches into a song called “I Lied to You,” addressed to his minister father (played by Saul Williams). It’s a confession that he’ll take the blues over the church any day. His singing pierces the veil, and we witness a litany of musicians joining the space from the past, present, and future: an Afrofuturist rock guitarist, hip hop DJs, breakers, twerkers, a ballerina, a Zaouli dancer, and Beijing opera performers, among others. Weaving in and out of Sammie’s blues, the sounds of each of these musicians layer and feed back into the mix to create a densely ecstatic sequence. This is the community healing piece of the voiceover thesis. The performers joining from far-flung places and times connect to an ancestral lineage of creative self-determination that runs through the patrons of the juke joint (Bo and Grace—played by Yao and Li Jun Li, respectively—are Chinese shop owners helping out at the juke joint and the presumed source of the Beijing opera performers).

Sinners’s musical conjuring isn’t an academic article, but it does have some musicological points to make. Audiences encounter musical styles uprooted from specific times and places, all mingling around this blues moment in 1932 Clarksdale. Coogler structures the scene by stacking out-of-time sound and movement, emphasizing the potency of a blues epistemology while also acknowledging that the blues’s power is situational. In its time—post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow—the blues could call in and draw on the fullness of diasporic music-making and world-mapping. But at other times, and in other places—say, a 2025 music venue—the blues is less likely to ignite such a moment as it is to show up as a participant, arriving as one of many in the musical ancestry to support the veil-piercers of the day. This phenomenon is the “changing same” of Black music, as Amiri Baraka put it in Blues People: “consistent attitudes with changed contexts” that explain why the sound changes over time (153). In Sinners, the immediate context is a community of Mississippi sharecroppers who seek healing, and the blues widens the frame so that the juke joint revelers can connect to and draw strength from a broader, deeper community beyond the edges of their material world.

As “I Lied to You” mingles with sounds past and future, the camera moves through the juke in a counterclockwise motion, grounding the scene further in diasporic ancestral practices. In Slave Culture (1987), Sterling Stuckey traces elements of Bakongo burial ceremonies throughout the New World, focusing especially on the ring shout, a sacred ceremony practiced by enslaved people in the United States involving a shuffling circular dance accompanied by song. Consistent across these traditions is counterclockwise movement:

Wherever in Africa the counterclockwise dance ceremony was performed—it is called the ring shout in North America—the dancing and singing were directed to the ancestors and gods, the tempo of the circle quickening during the course of movement. The ring in which the Africans danced and sang is the key to understanding the means by which they achieved oneness in America (12).

The counterclockwise circulation rehearses the life cycle, with the sun rising in the east (birth) and setting in the west (death), only to rise again (gesturing toward the connected nature of all life).

Stuckey draws on Robert Farris Thompson to note that special emphasis on counterclockwise motion would happen in Bakongo rituals that superimposed a cross on the circular movement, where the horizontal line represented the division between the living (above) and the dead (below). Here is the dividing line of Sinners, then: an ancestral ceremony with a crossroads superimposed on it, a blues invocation where the audience is propelled counterclockwise through the circle of juke joint dancers, where the dead and not yet alive join in the festivities.

The theme of lineage and ancestry courses through Coogler’s work. On the personal level, this may play out as a boxer sparring with his late father’s legacy. On a larger scale, Coogler often traverses the land of the Great Migration and the sea of the Middle Passage, tying back together the threads left dangling by the terrorisms of the transatlantic slave trade and Jim Crow. For a people whose lineage was savagely untethered by their ancestors’ enslavers, the power of a blues epistemology comes from its ability to tap into traditions and rituals that couldn’t be fully severed, restoring the “oneness” of those engaged in the dance and fueling their ability to imagine and create a path to freedom.

There is the other part of the voiceover’s thesis statement, though. When you pierce the veil, evil seeks to charge through. As the “I Lied to You” sequence hits peak intensity, Coogler treats movie audiences to another visual effect that the blues performers cannot see but feel; the juke joint appears to spontaneously combust and its roof is on fire (the roof, the roof. . .). Coogler metaphorically lets the motherfucker burn, down to the concrete foundation supporting the people as they continue to dance. At the edge of the dusty parking lot, the movie’s villain—an Irish vampire named Remmick—watches lustily while flanked by his latest converts. He wants Sammie; particularly what Sammie knows how to do.

Because Remmick hive-minds with whomever he turns into a vampire, taking on their memories and abilities, if he can get at Sammie, he’ll be able to pierce the veil, too, and commune once again with his long lost ancestors. We could read Remmick’s drive as an allegory about cultural appropriation, a white man who wants to steal the blues, and certainly there’s an element of that at play. But the “Killmonger was right” corollary of Coogler films suggests that villains are often more complex than they may at first seem. In Sinners, there’s a mob of Klansmen that function as the more straightforward baddies, but Coogler isn’t interested in giving them much screen time. Yet he lingers with Remmick just as he did with Killmonger and Namor in his two Black Panther installments. In each of these cases, Coogler explores different experiences of what it’s like when the boot of Empire is on your neck. Remmick, coming from Britain’s first colony, speaks of his home being taken and of religion being forced on him. He seems to hold genuine disdain for the Klan and notes that he’s happy to turn them all to prey, not because he wants what they have but because they deserve a gruesome death. He plays and dances to the music of his ancestors with care and devotion. And he argues that what he has to offer—community with his coven, the power to overtake the plantation class, eternal life—is better than what Smoke, Stack, Sammie, and the rest of the juke joint patrons currently have.

No one living trusts Remmick—in fact, Annie (Mosaku), the heart, brain, and wisdom of the movie, specifically distrusts him even before he reveals his true vampiric nature. And Coogler doesn’t position Remmick to be perceived as “good” in any sense of the word, except at playing that banjo. But, like Killmonger and Namor, Remmick gets to be right about some things. It appears in flickers of concession on characters’ faces when Remmick tells them they live in a place where they’ll always have to fight to even try to be truly free. It appears again when the juke joint protectors melt a bit during Remmick & Co’s performance of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” a glimmer of a thought of “wait, should we let them come inside and play this absolute bop??” (for detailed historical context for this song see Daphne Brooks’s “See My Face on the Other Side” [2017]). Coogler’s villains ultimately suffer defeat, but before they do, he makes sure audiences glimpse how they’ve suffered under Empire, offering an understanding of their destructive actions as born of unhealed generational trauma.

Piercing the veil is tricky work. Dangerous work. In The Long Emancipation (2021), Rinaldo Walcott notes that “much of what we have come to call Black culture is a mode of living life within, against, and beyond plantation logics” (20), not only a rejection of logics of oppression but also a practice of creating and nurturing something else. To set about finding knowledge and being, as Sylvia Wynter puts it, “completely outside our present conception of what it is to be human” is to set off into the not-fully-known, where one may encounter a variety of ideas and beings who won’t ultimately lead you to freedom but who may offer you something a little better than what you’ve got (Wynter, 2000 interview with David Scott, 136). Walcott calls this the difference between emancipation and actual freedom. While emancipation is often mistaken for freedom, Walcott argues that “postemancipation acts of Black life have been consistently interdicted, thereby preempting and often violently preventing Black life from authorizing its own desires for bodily autonomy” (105), preventing Black life from being free. 

In Sinners, Coogler shows us the way the blues could clear space for finding freedom, but none of the characters in the movie make it all the way there. It’s a movie situated in the long emancipation, where an imposed religion calls the blues the devil’s music, where plantation sharecropping and the Klan violently forestall Black freedom (but sometimes get what’s coming to them), and where various vampires carrying their own intergenerational trauma try to seduce Black people into accepting a different flavor of emancipation in place of the freedom the blues leads them toward. The map to freedom may not sound like the blues anymore, but Sinners reminds us the work isn’t done.

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Featured images: Screen Capture by SO!: Sammie’s right hand clutching broken guitar neck, black cross in the background against white wall [2:10]

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Justin Burton is a Professor of Music at Rider University, teaching primarily in the Music Production degree as well as in the Gender & Sexuality Studies program, and author of Posthuman Rap (Oxford, 2017) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (Oxford, 2018).

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

They Can Hear Us: Surveillance and Race in “A Quiet Place”–Justin Burton

Can’t Nobody Tell Me Nothin: Respectability and The Produced Voice in Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”–Justin Burton

SO! Amplifies: The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club–Chelsea Adams

World Listening Day 2015: Mendi + Keith Obadike’s “Blues Speaker [for James Baldwin]” (2015) #WLD2015

“Music More Ancient than Words”: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories on Africana Aurality — Aaron Carter-Ényì

Music Meant to Make You Move: Considering the Aural Kinesthetic–Imani Kai Johnson

I’m 13 and my best friend from primary school asks me if I have an account on Tumblr. I do, but I’m not sure if I want her to know. She broke the unspoken rule, you never share your blog with IRL friends, it’s taboo to talk about it. I hesitantly agree, and we exchange blogs. I take a look at her page. In her bio, there’s a quote from Forrest Gump: ‘Life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.’ Her reblogs consist of summer destinations, clean girls in bikinis, LA highways lined with palms, New York architecture, and Brandy Melville models. I scroll lower and lower and am becoming engulfed in shame. What is she gonna think of me when she sees my blog? Is she gonna think I’m crazy or unstable? I need to check my recently reblogged posts to determine how bad it is. I open my blog page. The difference between our visual aesthetics and personalities is imminent. I go through black and white analogue photos with depressing captions, graphic self-harm content, gifs from AHS Asylum, posts glorifying eating disorders, grunge fashion, soft animals lying on the grass, and nihilistic quotes from coming-of-age movies. I frantically scroll through my own blog as if seeing it for the first time, suddenly aware of how performative my pain looks when viewed through someone else’s eyes.

In the next couple of years, I will forget all about Tumblr, and I will slowly stop reblogging. I will migrate to different platforms with my peers, but fortunately never delete my account. My blog will patiently wait for me to return, but… so will the same feelings of shame and cringe, preserved with embarrassing clarity and waiting to reveal itself as an archive of my becoming.

The decision to slowly stop using Tumblr would, unexpectedly, come as a direct result of a certain motion. In 2018, the last year of Verizon’s and Yahoo!’s ownership of the platform, NSFW visual content was to be completely banned from the platform. After losing about 30% of the user traffic on the platform in response to a stricter content policy, the American media giant got rid of the site and sold it to Automattic for less than 0.3% of the purchase price. For a little while, it seemed like the platform had come full circle: being bought back by a company that is responsible for the blog service WordPress.com, seemed to promise the return to the simpler times: easily made, accessible blogs!! reunited communities!! unchanged, not-algorithm dictated dashboard!! chronological feed!! ….but, wait…not so fast….. slow down.. In February 2024, Automattic announced it would start selling its users’ data to OpenAI and Midjourney…… So much for the simpler times….

At 22 years old, I discovered mouchette.org while researching net art works for my thesis. The site, created by French artist Martine Neddam in 1996, mimics a teenage girl’s diary with deliberate naivety and whimsy: pink text, buzzing flies, stuffed animals, and a navigation menu that mimics early GeoCities pages. Yet, the content quickly subverts this childish innocence, with hyperlinks leading to the deepest curiosities of a seemingly pre-adolescent mind. From asking site visitors to physically connect through the cold surface of the screen, and asking strangers on the internet how to commit suicide, to suicide notes, and a forum where visitors share their struggles, jokes, experiences, and offers of help.

While exploring the domain of mouchette.org, I noticed myself getting lost in the same familiar feelings that, up until now, were intrinsic to scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard. The dark thoughts and desires displayed by the character of an almost 13-year-old being out in the open brought me back to the same feelings I had at 13.

What struck me was how precisely Neddam had anticipated the aesthetic and behavioral patterns that would later define Tumblr’s confessional culture. The site’s juxtaposition of girlish visuals with existential dread mirrored my own Tumblr experience. Whereas, of course, the difference was Mouchette’s website being a carefully constructed artwork, and our Tumblr blogs were most often unconscious, messy autofictions.

Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics helps explain Tumblr’s ecosystem of shared vulnerability. In The Female Complaint, Berlant argues that:

an intimate public is an achievement. Whether linked to women or other nondominant people, it flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x.[1]

Tumblr operationalized this: the platform’s reblog function turned intimate, personal suffering into viral, communal texts. Every disturbing post wasn’t only a cry for help, but a template others could adapt. Notes under graphic self-harm posts functioned as a perverse metric of care, where visibility equaled validation. You learned to package your despair in aesthetically pleasing ways, to juxtapose frat party gifs with confessions about your eating disorder, to make your suffering palatable enough to be consumed by strangers. We weren’t expressing sadness, in reality, we were competing in what could only be called the Trauma Olympics, where visibility passed for validation and the most graphic posts received the most notes.

This tension between real pain and performed pain is where Mouchette becomes most illuminating. In an interview with Anett Dekker, Neddam describes the suicide forum of mouchette’s website as “a social space where people could communicate and help other people“. It’s striking how precisely this project anticipated the ecosystems of care we’d later build and use on Tumblr. Mouchette’s greatest insight wasn’t that people would perform care online, but that they’d do so more earnestly for a fictional character than platforms would ever let them do for each other. We built real support systems in Tumblr’s margins, but instead of making our troubles solvable, the platform turned them scrollable.

I feel like it is crucial when talking about Tumblr to include the Sad Girl Theory, since its roots are deeply interlinked with the platform. In 2014, artist and writer Audrey Wollen proposed a theory that female sadness should be looked at as an act of resistance against the hypermasculine system of domination,[2] rather than a performative, self-involved, passive action. In retrospect, I have trouble agreeing with Wollen’s theory. As opposed to stigmatized notions of sharing[3] your private business, especially on topics surrounding mental health, all the trauma posting I encountered in my years on Tumblr in some way felt liberating. This liberation and — as called by Wollen, resistance swiftly turned into another online aesthetic, which itself was tailored to capitalise on white, skinny, western middle-class girls and their pain, leaving no space for anyone who didn’t fit into those very confined categories.

(More on sad girl theory, read: Revisiting Sad Girl Sentiments)

Maybe what Wollen’s Sad Girl Theory misses is that our Tumblr years weren’t just about resistance or aesthetics – they were the messy work of digital adolescence. This was the evolution of drawing eyes and roses in middle school notebooks, translated for the platform age. Where we once filled margins with angsty song lyrics, we would reblog My Chemical Romance lyrics over grainy photos. The physical diary became an infinitely scrollable dashboard, but the impulse remained the same: to externalize the unbearable weight of teenage angst.

To conclude my reflection on my Tumblr archive, maybe what emerges isn’t just shame or nostalgia, but something more useful. A critical lens on how platforms mediate emotional development in the platform era. These archives matter not because they’re embarrassing or profound, but because they document what it means to come of age in systems that turn identity formation into engagement data.

I want to end this essay with a #hopecore message I found while perusing the suicide forum of mouchette.org. I am leaving you with a message from Loraen O. D. from the 10^th of May 2010.

Live to love deary if nothing else. Pleasing to all and as addictive as a smile, love is all you need. All other emotion crumbles before it; they are neutralized in its wake. Love heals all woundsas they say. You suffer mearly from the lack of this emotion. A simple prescription of love once a day will remedy this childish desire for an end of yours. Open up to your anyone, hang out with that someone, share a smile with a stranger. Love is not a commodity in short supply, rather it is in low demand. It comes to those who look for it. My dear, find love and you will never forget it. Likewise it will never forget you. Find it in any form with anyone and when you have found it, cherish it. Go on; start now! Don’t wait. Get on the phone and talk to Julia, or got to Alex’s house. Head over to the local park and smile at people, talk about the weather or the world. Walk to your father, tell him you love him. Run to your mother, give her a hug. Theres no time to lose, only time to gain assuming the state your in. To start you off and to end my note I’d like to say: Good luck, have fun, and I Love You!

[1] Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Duke University Press, 2008, p. 8.

[2] https://www.dazeddigital.com/photography/article/28463/1/girls-are-finding-empowerment-through-internet-sadness

[3] Stigma imposed by previous generations, that inculcated the same conception in our (millenial, gen-z) generation.

Anielek Niemyjski is an Artistic Research graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Their research practice is centered around early net art works, alternative exhibition practices on the web and collective digital memory.

Dr. Jonathan Sterne passed away earlier this year. He was, in many ways, a model scholar and colleague.

The intellectual ferment of the field now called “sound studies” is often traced to the sonic ecologists of the 1960s, but the theoretical energy of the early 2000s, generated by figures such as Ana Maria Ochoa, Alexander Weheliye, Emily Thompson, Trevor Pinch (1952-2021), and of course Jonathan Sterne, was necessary for the field to gain interdisciplinary traction in the twenty-first century. Sterne’s The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press: 2003) was perhaps the single-most important book in this regard.

Trained in communications, and working in departments of communication, first at Pitt and later McGill, Sterne oriented his work toward media studies, and indeed, The Audible Past is principally about mediation. It poses questions about the role of sound in the history of mediation that earlier generations of sound studies had tended to elide, especially regarding the contingent and often cultural role of the human ear in reception.  These questions opened the door for anthropologists, historians, communications scholars and ethnomusicologists in particular to think and even identify with sound studies, and many of us who were trained in the 2000s did so enthusiastically, with Sterne’s writing a lodestar.

The enduring terms and frameworks that came from The Audible Past alone are remarkable: the audiovisual litany, a critique of the chestnut that hearing and vision are ideological binaries, for example, is practically axiomatic now in sound studies. And its clever expression of the audiovisual binary’s religious undertones (see also “The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality” [2011], one of many worthwhile Sternian deep cuts) further thickens the plot. Consider as well the concept of “audile techniques,” or vernacular methods of audition that emerge in response to new sound reproduction technologies, which has been used to frame countless projects in sonic histories of science, medicine, business, and technology. To revisit The Audible Past now is to witness a thinker who anticipated the central questions of an emergent field at the moment of its rekindling, with prescience and depth.

Sterne’s focus on media continued, although his second monograph—and Sounding Out!’s first book review!– MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke University Press: 2012) saw a move toward Marxist economic analysis, the kind of methodological shift that he would pull off time and again. The book is almost certainly the most complete treatment of what was (and to some degree remains) the world’s most important audio reproduction format, and once again he introduced a concept, that of “format theory,” that is widely and actively cited (and reviewed by Pitchfork!). The book is also funny! Sterne’s revelation of the Napster cat head logo at the end of a chapter about the role of cat heads in auditory lab experiments is the sort of superb comic timing which, to put it lightly, one doesn’t find much in academic writing.

Sterne was not limited to media-focused work, however. He was responsive to current events: his 2012 “Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest,” for instance, was an on-the-spot reading of the sonic tactics of local student tuition strikes. He worked ethnographically: a 1997 article, published in Ethnomusicology and called “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space,” is an immersive study of music in retail space. He was an excellent editor: his 2012 The Sound Studies Reader (Routledge) is superbly curated, remaining a cornerstone assignment. More recently, he turned to disability studies, publishing Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke University Press) in 2022. The book is philosophical as well as reflexive and personal, showcasing yet more of his range. The way that Sterne allowed curiosity to lead his research in many directions suggests a scholar who was in the business for the right reasons.

Yet still this breadth and influence pales compared to what he arguably did best and most enthusiastically – mentoring students. He did not advise me formally, but when I was a graduate student he was friendly and accessible, which since his admission to hospice I have learned he was for many other people as well. Like the enduringly resonant concepts in The Audible Past and other books, bits of his advice still ring in my ears, and I pass those tidbits on to other students now. His letters of recommendation for his own students were inspired, indeed among the most thoughtful I’ve ever read. He respected his students enormously, and on their behalf wrote long, detailed letters in which they were cast as mature thinkers, and their scholarship as a serious project.

There are many scholars whom we might memorialize for their published contributions, but we should reserve a higher space for those whose mentorship commitments were as deep as Sterne’s. For all of his critical insights, he was motivated in the end not by status but by community, which the outpouring of sadness at his passing reveals above all. Farewell, then, to an architect of sound studies who, safe to say, was also widely loved.

***

PS: We encourage you to leave “Sterne stories” and other memories of Jonathan in the comments to this post.

—

Benjamin Tausig is associate professor of music at SUNY-Stony Brook University, and author of Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford, 2019) and Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies (Duke, 2025).

—

REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Sterneworks!

Quebec’s #casseroles: on participation, percussion and protest–Jonathan Sterne

Sounding Out! Podcast #27: Interview with Jonathan Sterne

This is What It Sounds Like . . . . . . . . On Prince (1958-2016) and Interpretive Freedom–Benjamin Tausig

SO! Amplifies: The Electric Golem (Trevor Pinch and James Spitznagel)—Qiushi Xu 

SO! Reads: Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format–-Aaron Trammell

From CPOV to the Manifesto for Wikimedia Research

I was a Master’s student at UC Berkeley’s iSchool when I traveled to Bangalore for INC’s first Critical Point of View conference in January 2010. Two more CPOV conferences followed, in Amsterdam and Leipzig. Bangalore was a pivotal moment for me. I had been an activist in the free and open source software and open content movement for many years prior to going to graduate school. I left because I had become disillusioned by what I felt was a lack of global solidarity around the problems of exclusion facing open culture and a belief that open copyright licenses were not the key to liberation that I once believed they were. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia was the jewel in the crown of the open movement at the time. But from my perspective, in Johannesburg and then Nairobi, everything was not as it seemed. There was a growing number of examples that Wikipedia editors were actively rejecting articles about Majority World topics, that some areas of the encyclopedia were riddled with enduring conflict and that large parts of the world remained dark on maps of Wikipedia place articles.

The CPOV conference was like coming home. There I met so many who charted my career path, including the internet geographer, Mark Graham who became my PhD supervisor at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Wikipedian, Dror Kamir, who taught me about the mechanics of conflict on Wikipedia. More importantly, though, I learned the power of critical research from Geert Lovink and  Nathaniel Tkacz who said that the “C” in “Critical” is not about being negative or dismissive about Wikipedia but rather about taking Wikipedia seriously by asking critical questions about its important place in the world.

The resulting INC CPOV (Critical Point of View) Reader, published in 2011, established a new way of thinking about Wikipedia that emphasised the platform’s socio-cultural, political, and economic implications. It is hard to over-emphasise the importance of this humble reader. It established a new space and frame for Wikipedia research, radically independent from the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation and led by methods and theories from humanist tradition which continues (to this day) as a tiny minority in the sea of positivist, computational social science approaches to Wikipedia research.

15 years later, nurturing a space for Wikipedia researchers, artists and activists in the humanist tradition is more important than ever, as is articulating what questions are important for researchers to answer. Wikipedia has became one of the most critical sources of knowledge about the world, defining what counts as the consensus truth about people, places, events, and other phenomena for a generation. Wikipedia has been joined by other sites under the Wikimedia banner, offering a range of free images, books, definitions and data and establishing the goal of becoming “essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge” by 2030.

Today we continue the work of the CPoV project by launching the Manifesto for Wikipedia Research. The manifesto marks an important milestone for critical Wikipedia research, setting out ten principles for critical research on Wikipedia and its sister projects in the larger Wikimedia stable. Like CPoV before us, the manifesto was seeded at a meeting of critical, humanist Wikimedia researchers at the wikihistories symposium in Brisbane last year where we gathered to discuss Wikimedia’s changing role “and/as data”. We asked: “What would need to change in our research practice if we accepted that Wikimedia has become public knowledge infrastructure?”

Wikimedia projects are generally recognised as readily available data sources for public research and private extraction. But the circulation of this data without a critical understanding of how it is being produced can lead to Wikipedia’s socio-cultural biases becoming exacerbated. In an age where Wikimedia operates as public knowledge infrastructure, it is necessary to rekindle the critical spirit of CPoV i.e. where critique is in aid of specific understandings of current issues and problems, rather than wholesale, knee-jerk negativity or conservatism.

Recognising and investigating Wikimedia’s implications for shaping public understanding of issues, debates, and controversies across various domains, we present 10 principles for Wikimedia researchers working to understand its role in the global information and knowledge ecosystem. The manifesto is a call to “Together, interrogate and reconstitute Wikimedia as public knowledge infrastructure”. With it, we continue the legacy of CPoV and provide a path for those who want to better understand exactly which lessons we will learn from Wikipedia as its importance continues to grow.

The Manifesto for Wikipedia Research (https://manifesto.wiki/, republished below) is authored by Heather Ford, Bunty Avieson, Francesco Bailo, Michael Davis, Michael Falk, Sohyeon Huang, Andrew Iliadis, Steve Jankowski, Amanda Lawrence and Francesca Sidoti

An A3 printable poster of the manifesto: https://wikihistories.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/WikiPoster_a3.pdf

A commentary in Big Data & Society Journal written by Steve Jankowski, Heather Ford, Andrew Iliadis and Francesca titled “Uniting and reigniting critical Wikimedia research”.

—

Map the dispossession of the commons

We witness the ongoing struggle to determine what it means for information to be “free” and for whom this freedom generates value. We follow Wikimedian data as it circulates within techno-legal regimes of the public domain, copyright, and intellectual property law in ways that provide radical openings and concerning enclosures that alienate the altruism of community labour.

Recognise Wikimedia’s role as a hub of global knowledge infrastructure

We trace how Wikimedia projects intersect, combine, and feed into other applications, platforms, systems, and knowledge institutions. We work to understand how Wikimedia operates at the level of knowledge infrastructure, supplying and being supplied by data that affects the coverage of topics far from the Wikimedia platform. We also examine how its existence is influenced by the ready supply of volunteer labour, expertise, and funding.

Examine power relations

We investigate the power relations that characterise Wikimedia’s global community and stakeholders, including the Wikimedia Foundation. We also critically examine the role that these power relations play in Wikimedia as a knowledge institution, which results in ideological biases and epistemic gaps in the platform and manifests its own kinds of digital politics.

Explore the juxtapositions of Wikimedia policies and practices

We explore the differences between ideal rhetoric – or what Wikimedia says it wants to be – and what Wikimedia is, i.e., the actual practices that have emerged, accumulated, and calcified over time. We ask how Wikimedia’s practices and outcomes differ depending on contexts and the positions within the infrastructure that the activity is located.

Investigate linguistic and cultural plurality

The English-language Wikipedia, for example, does not stand-in for all of Wikipedia or all the other Wikimedia projects including Wikidata or Wikimedia Commons. We work to understand how different Wikimedia language versions and projects reflect different kinds of problems, puzzles, and ways of knowing that stem from differences in culture, scale, resourcing, and objectives.

Assess the implications of algorithms

We study the role of AI models and algorithms in shaping the production, circulation, and reception of Wikimedia projects and data. Studies of production include bots and bespoke code such as templates that frame subjects and direct editorial activity. Circulation studies include applications such as chatbots, search rankings, and recommendation systems that shape sustainability, knowledge integrity, and information discovery for Wikimedia projects. Reception studies analyse how users across the web who interact with Wikimedia data via search engines, social media platforms, chatbots, as well as galleries, libraries, archives, and museums interpret and make meaning from the Wikimedia data they encounter.

Historicise Wikimedia’s epistemology

We examine Wikipedia and Wikimedia’s epistemological foundations, including its emphasis on consensus, neutrality, and the “verifiability, not truth” policy. Likewise, we examine how the project of Wikimedia has inherited ideas from the Enlightenment, historical practices of encyclopaedic production, and twentieth-century dreams of technocratic governance. We consider how these principles and histories influence knowledge representation and other epistemic institutions and activities.

Study Wikimedia’s data as partial, temporary, fallible and shifting

We resist treating facts, information, and policies as finalised, even though data’s fluctuation does not mean it has less impact on those it represents, however fleetingly.

Situate research practice

We reflect on our positionality as researchers based in particular places, with particular understandings and theories of knowledge, and in positions of power concerning global knowledge systems. This also means being cognisant of the ethics of studying online spaces as groups of people and not just as text, information, or data.

Build a shared project of critical investigation across disciplines

We encourage researchers from different fields to discuss, debate, and conduct critical research about Wikimedia data. Importantly, new research questions demand that old methods be repurposed and that new methods be developed, ones that are sensitive to the diverse socio-technical situations of Wikimedia data and recognise its inherently qualitative and quantitative nature, thereby opening pathways for innovative mixed-methods research approaches These conditions make drawing on each other’s disciplinary strengths necessary to stay attentive to research gaps and methodological oversights.

Background

A manifesto for Wikimedia research was formulated at a meeting of critical, humanist Wikimedia researchers in Brisbane, 2024. We gathered to discuss Wikimedia’s changing role “and/as data” as Wikipedia and its sister sites have become increasingly important as a foundation of knowledge circulating via AI tools. We asked: “What would need to change in our research practice if we accepted that Wikimedia has become public knowledge infrastructure?”

Founded in 2001, Wikipedia quickly became one of the most critical sources of knowledge about the world, defining what counts as the consensus truth about people, places, events, and other phenomena for a generation. Over two decades later, Wikipedia has been joined by other sites under the Wikimedia banner, offering a range of free images, books, definitions and data and establishing the goal of becoming “essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge” by 2030 (Wikimedia Foundation, 2030 Movement Strategy).

In 2011, the Critical Point of View (CPoV) project established a new way of thinking about Wikipedia that emphasised the platform’s socio-cultural, political, and economic implications, calling for “an informed, radical critique from the inside.” Since then, Wikipedia (and other projects under the purview of Wikimedia) has become an accepted public resource of general information, a primary data source for knowledge graphs and now generative AI models.

Wikimedia projects are generally recognised as readily available data sources for public research and private extraction. But the circulation of this data without a critical understanding of how it is being produced can lead to Wikipedia’s socio-cultural biases becoming exacerbated. In an age where Wikimedia operates as public knowledge infrastructure, it is necessary to rekindle the critical spirit of CPoV i.e. where critique is in aid of specific understandings of current issues and problems, rather than wholesale, knee-jerk negativity or conservatism.

Recognising and investigating Wikimedia’s implications for shaping public understanding of issues, debates, and controversies across various domains, we present 10 principles for Wikimedia researchers working to understand its role in the global information and knowledge ecosystem. The manifesto is a call to “Together, interrogate and reconstitute Wikimedia as public knowledge infrastructure”.

Contributors

Dr Heather Ford is a writer, scholar and designer of public knowledge technologies. Her research focuses on the social implications of digital media technologies and the ways in which they might be better designed and regulated to prevent disinformation, social exclusion, and epistemic injustice. She currently works as an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney where she is working to facilitate public responses to AI literacy.

Dr Bunty Avieson is a Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow (ARC) in the Discipline of Media and Communications at University of Sydney. Her research investigates Wikipedia as a site for knowledge construction and cultural resilience, and she is Chief Investigator on a DECRA-funded project to develop Dzongkha language Wikipedia in Bhutan. Her work considers the intersection of orality, literacy and digitality, and the applicability of the Gutenberg Parenthesis theory.

Dr Francesco Bailo is lecturer in Data Analytics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, where is also deputy director of the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance. His research intersects digital media, political communication, and computational social science. His work primarily explores the dynamics of online political participation and the impact of social media on political discourse.

Dr Michael Davis is research fellow at the UTS Centre for Media Transition, where he leads the information integrity research program. Combining an academic background in philosophy and practical experience in digital platform regulation, Michael’s research applies ideas from social epistemology to problems of information integrity. His current work focuses on the challenge of balancing platform accountability and freedom of expression in misinformation regulation, and on the impact of generative AI on the information ecosystem, including open knowledge infrastructure such as Wikipedia.

Dr Michael Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Romanticism and the Contingent Self (Palgrave, 2024), which uses digital methods to explore the language of subjectivity in Romantic literature. He is the author of numerous articles on Artificial Intelligence, Book History, Digital Humanities and similar topics. He is a Chief Investigator on the wikihistories project.

Dr Sohyeon Hwang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Her work focuses on communities as a valuable point of organising to anticipate and respond to the potential harms of sociotechnical systems. In her projects, she leverages mixed methods to understand how community governance can be better supported so that everyday people have greater agency in addressing pressing issues such as those around online safety and information integrity.

Dr. Andrew Iliadis is an Associate Professor at Temple University in the Department of Media Studies and Production (within the Klein College of Media and Communication). He is the author of Semantic Media: Mapping Meaning on the Internet (Polity, 2022), co-editor of Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles (MIT Press, 2020), and co-translator of Cybernetics and the Origin of Information (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).

Dr. Steve Jankowski is Assistant Professor in New Media Histories at the University of Amsterdam and Principal Investigator of the Slow Editing Towards Equity research funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. He received his PhD in Communication and Culture from York University and Toronto Metropolitan University in Canada for his dissertation on Wikipedian consensus and the political design of encyclopedic media. His research examines the intersections between digital culture, design and their connections to imaginaries of democracy and knowledge.

Dr Amanda Lawrence is Program Director at the Australian Internet Observatory, and Affiliate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society at RMIT University. Her interests include open knowledge systems, libraries, research communication, public policy, Wikimedia and public interest research infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences.

 Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the wikihistories project at University of Technology, Sydney. She is a cultural geography scholar, who specialises in place-oriented, qualitative research across academic and applied settings. She is particularly interested in how places shape and enduringly affect people’s experience, including how this manifests in the digital space.

July 7, 2025

Dear Geert—

These missives trying to explain what’s happening in the New World to friends in the Old World become more and more like describing the contours of a Klein bottle, the higher dimensional version of the better known Möbius strip. Like the Möbius strip, the Klein bottle, which can only exist in four dimensions, is distinguished by its continuous surface, it has no inside and no outside. Most socio-politico-economic analyses are predicated on stripping away the surface to reveal the “real” forms of power (viz Karl Marx’s concepts of base and superstructure) but this moment in America feels like it’s all surface with no underlying anatomy. As I mentioned last month, the reigning sensibility of Trump 2.0 is that “they’re not happy until we’re not happy,” which is pure continuous surface reactivity, a Klein bottle of resentment and cruelty.

All over the Internet you find a quote that seems to sum up our moment perfectly: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” That this is attributed to V.I. Lenin, even though he never said it, makes the sentiment even more perfectly suited for the feels here in Los Angeles. In the month since my last missive, it’s truly felt like decades have passed. We’ve had an influx of masked, heavily armed men who claim to be United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. I write claim, because they arrive in unmarked cars, refuse to show ID or warrants, and wear—ludicrously in an urban setting—camo everything. They are supposed to be targeting “illegals with criminal records,” but what they are really doing follows the fascist playbook of targeting a minority, demanding their papers on the street, and taking them away without due process.

This egregious lawlessness prompted righteous demonstrations against these secret policemen. The demonstrations in turn led to some social disorder, including vandalism, but less that my city sees after sports teams win national championships. Nonetheless, that whiff of violence was what the Trump administration was hoping for. In its immediate aftermath, the President of the United States went against the wishes of both the mayor and the Governor to deploy the state’s National Guard to Los Angeles’ downtown, and then, for the first time in decades, added a contingent of active-duty military, in this case the Marines. Neither the 700 Marines nor the 4,000 guardsmen have had much to do, and the later weren’t even properly provisioned with “hots and cots”—meaning meals and adequate living arrangements. But it didn’t matter because in the US we are living through a politics that’s based on optics not ideology, much less competency.

The ICE agents may fear being doxed, but their masking serves to create a terrifying image. The Marines in Downtown Los Angeles are mirroring the troops who just marched through Washington on Trump’s birthday (a martial display the President had been chafing for since seeing one in France during his first administration). Yet the depravity of the deportations and the military’s peacetime deployment in an American city are just floating turds in the continuing flooding of the zone with shit, and the weeks-where-decades-happen just keep happening.

The raids go on, with ICE agents in armored vehicles and on horseback. The detentions are happening all around us in Southern California (my local car wash was raided and two workers were disappeared just last week) and Angelenos continue to demonstrate against them. I see more and more “Sin Helio—Without ICE” bilingual tee shirts, but it’s hard to keep focused on those atrocities, with so much else going on at the same time. After all, in the past month, as part of our bipartisan support for the Benjamin Netanyahu regime, the US started and then abruptly ended a conflict with Iran. Just twelve days later, the worst legislative act of my lifetime was enacted in record time.

I am no economist, so the subtleties of the deceptions and degradations of the “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act” escape me. But I can understand that the bill, passed by obedient Republican partisans with the narrowest of margins, and then signed into law – on America’s Independence Day no less—by a President who won the office by a scant one and half percent of the popular vote, fundamentally shifts the burden of paying for America’s needs from the rich to the not-at-all-rich, and siphons one trillion dollars from the poor to make sure that billionaires can have ever more lavish destination weddings and corporations can escape both taxation and regulation. This isn’t populism, but somehow it floats, turd-like, along the surface of the MAGA zone. Those on the outside of that Klein bottle, which of course has no outside, are made even more unhappy, and so the surface remains unbroken.

This sense of continuous surface is an outgrowth of Trump’s focus on optics. To work through the politics of the moment via optics is not to ignore the pain of families being sundered, children being denied medical services both here and abroad, and the daily humiliations of being outside the racial and gendered dynamics of the MAGA nation. But we can’t stick with the “reality-based community” to grok our situation, a community that has been losing ground since the GW Bush administration. It’s not so much “truthiness” anymore, than it is the realization that we’re now denizens of a multiverse in which truth never existed in the first place. The United States has become a Klein bottle of unverifiability in four dimensions of pure, continuous surface.

One of the only sure ways to gain relief from this Klein bottle is to harness the power of art. So it was on Independence Day, we went to see a 50^th anniversary screening of Robert Altman’s masterpiece of Americana, Nashville. Even before the film was released, the New Yorker’s film critic, Pauline Kael, understood just how powerfully effective and affecting were Nashville’s intersecting storylines, overlapping dialogue and seamless transitions between scripted and improvised action: “Altman’s art, like Fred Astaire’s, is the great American art of making the impossible look easy.” Filmed and set just before the nation’s Bicentennial, Altman uses Southern country musicians in the Grand Ole Opry as a Greek chorus to comment on a nation still reeling from the political scandals of Watergate and the moral rot of Vietnam.

The parallels with the United State just before its 250^th anniversary are striking. The wannabes who are certain, just certain, that fame and fortune are only one record deal away no matter if they have talent or not set the emotional tone for 21^st century influencer culture. The split between Tennessee’s down home sensibilities and the urban sophistication of visitors from Los Angeles has been sharpened to a lethal edge by endless culture wars. There’s even a long-shot, outsider Presidential candidate storming the citadels of power. That the specter of assassination floats above all the actions and interaction, makes Nashville that much more powerful today, after Donald J. Trump survived not one but two attempts on his life in his run to recapture power. That he survived being shot, and rose to his feet, pumping his fist, yelling “fight, fight, fight” as he was being dragged away from the line of fire gave both the candidate and his supporters a sense of divine mission and heroic invincibility.  His survival was real, but the image he created was also part of an optic that had been developing that was entirely imaginary.

From the very start, MAGA both online and IRL promulgated memes of Trump as an invincible, muscular, God Emperor. In chats, on Facebook, printed on towels and flags, held up at rallies, Trump is a caricature of alpha male manliness. This soon-to-be-octogenarian golfer has been portrayed as a ‘roided-out hero from an 80s movie: his abs are ripped, his biceps bulging, his guns blazing. When he made his first, pathetic foray into the world of crypto grifting, it was with a series of NFTs of himself in various guises from superhero to astronaut, cowboy to race car driver. What was rarely mentioned was that the designs for the cards were drawn from an aborted run of NFTs commissioned by and portraying Sylvester Stallone. The Trump cards were, therefore, imaginaries of an aging reality television star cosplaying an aging action film star cosplaying his own youthful, more powerful, self. In the Klein bottle we call the USA, the optics of power are simultaneous with power itself, a continuous surface. Trump is no topologist, but he understands the new terrain as he ramps up his culture wars. Asked the difference between his first term and the second, the most vindictive president in American history replied “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter.” The optics and the actions will only get worse before they get better.

Best—

Peter

(previous letters from Peter Lunenfeld can be found here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/author/peterlunenfeld/)

Post-Communist Grounds. In Search of the Commons’ is a collection of  interventions seek to explore and activate practices of commoning in post-communism in a range of genres and media forms, with a specific interest in developing experimental aesthetic practices.

​This volume seeks to re-orient discussions about the commons away from prevailing frames of analyses, which tend to ‘assume that emancipatory ideas of commons and commoning come from the West’ (Vilenica, 2023).  On par with this supposition is the devaluation of experiments in commoning situated elsewhere that engage different historical experiences of struggle against enclosures. This includes not only various efforts of organizing reproductive labor, public infrastructure, or free time during state socialism across the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’, but also the experiences of anti-imperialist, agrarian, and anarchist struggles and revolts in these regions that may as well have predated or, as it were, outlived the formation of socialist states. The volume brings together contributions that depart from differently constituted ‘post-communist grounds’ to reshuffle and remix their composition, setting them in productive relation to questions that define our present-day: from an intimate engagement with the feminized experience of labor emigration in contemporary Georgia to the disappearance of spaces of everyday creativity in Poland to accounts of the challenges of internationalist organizing on the Left today through the prism of the collective LeftEast. While some of the contributions engage historical and archival materials from different contexts, none of them employ a reifying approach towards the past. Instead, each works with different materials, media, or modalities of writing – from poetry to illustration, from essay to collage to movement score – to chart alternative coordinates in our present and future grounds of coming together.

Edited by: Neda Genova

Second Editor: Salome Berdzenishvili

Copy Editing: Callum Bradley

Book Cover Art: Miha Brebenel

Contributors: Sasha Anikina, Aleksei Borisionok, Noah Brehmer, Miha Brebenel, Aleksandra Fila, Nino Gavasheli, Hanna Grześkiewicz, ​Mariya P. Ivancheva, Rastko Novaković, Olia Sosnovskaya, ​Mary N. Taylor, and ​Yasemin Keskintepe.

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2025.

ISBN: 9789083520940
Contact: Institute of Network Cultures
Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

This publication was created with financial support from The Leverhulme Trust (grant number ECF-2021-404, Early Career Fellowship), University of Warwick’s Enhancing Research Culture Development Fund (2023/24), and Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities’ HEIF Research Stimulus Fund (2024/25) at the University of Southampton.
It is published under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

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Order a free copy HERE

**This piece is co-authored by Wanda Alarcón, Dolores Inés Casillas, Esther Díaz Martín, Sara Veronica Hinojos, and Cloe Gentile Reyes

For weeks, we have been inundated with executive orders (220 at last count), alarming budget cuts (from science and the arts to our national parks), stupendous tariff hikes, the defunding of DEI-anything, the banning of transgender troops, a Congressional renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, terrifying ICE raids, and sadly, a refreshed MAGA constituency with a reinvigorated anti-immigrant public sentiment. Worse, the handlers for the White House’s social media publish sinister MAGA-directed memes, GIFs across their social channels. These reputed Public Service Announcements (PSAs), under President Trump’s second term, ruthlessly go after immigrants. 

It’s difficult to refuse to listen despite our best attempts.

“The ASMR video was true.”

On February 18, 2025, the official White House social media account, @WhiteHouse, shared a 40-second video showing a group of detained immigrants boarding a military aircraft for deportation. The video was captioned: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, features gentle, soothing sounds—such as whispering, tapping, or brushing—which can evoke pleasurable tingling sensations. In this satirical ASMR-style post, however, the sounds include the clinking of metal shackles on concrete floors, the jangle of handcuffs against bodies, and the grating of metal on metal as detainees slowly ascend the aircraft’s steps. By framing these distressing noises within the ASMR genre, the video invites listeners to consume them as aesthetically pleasing; encouraging a visceral embodiment where the sounds of violence toward migrants elicit an uncontrollable physical pleasure that seeps through the body. This effectively turns state violence into an unsettling sonic spectacle. Cruelty towards migrants, according to Cristina Beltrán, is not a failure of democracy but an expression of it. The (sonic) spectacle of migrant cruelty functions as a political practice meant to sustain white democracy as both a racial and political category.

Framed within ASMR, Trump’s official message is unmistakably “saying the quiet part out loud.” But not all that well. A closer listen reveals that the roar of the jet engine drowns out more intimate, human sounds: footsteps on the tarmac, the rustle of police pat-downs, and the deep, rhythmic breaths—proof of life—condemned. Listening to this disturbing post, we become attuned to our own internal pleads; our refusal to believe until the unsettling truth confirms: this isn’t a parody or a hoax—it’s real.

How does a sonic social media trend—built around such sounds as the crinkling of chip bags, the crunches of eating, the tap-tap of acrylic nails, the gentle clinks of typing or espresso-making—become a soundboard for  the forced removal of immigrants? Indeed, the video has amassed nearly 105 million views on X alone. Clearly, the post broadcasts a pedagogy of cruelty—a lesson in how to aestheticize suffering—and we are left questioning just how far that message both travels and resonates. For many, the video is neither entertaining nor soothing, but rather shocking, offensive, and deeply disturbing. 

Written comments show more revulsion than support, with many users openly challenging the video. In doing so, their protest, contained in the comments, starts to dismantle the ASMR aesthetic, undercutting its intended sense of calm. After all, the video isn’t particularly convincing as ASMR to begin with! These are echoes of dissent, outrage, and refusal, that accompany the in-person collective actions that have taken place across the nation rallying against Trump’s broader white-supremacist and anti-democratic agenda. 

 “What was louder was the screaming and cursing inside my head.” 

History shows us that abolitionist efforts often relied on the sounds and images of chains to evoke empathy for enslaved Africans—making their suffering and humanity visible to a broader public. Yet, as Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection makes clear, such representations can easily devolve into a spectacle of suffering, where the emphasis shifts from the enslaved person to the emotional response of the white witness. Today, that same auditory imagery—clinking metal, mechanical restraints—resurfaces, but in a profoundly different register. No longer stirring empathy, they risk desensitizing listeners to the pain and struggle of Latinx migrants. This ASMR instance, directed at MAGA-listeners, prioritizes a cruel-yet-gleeful response without any compassion whatsoever towards immigrants. 

The word “Illegal” in the caption further amplifies the discourse of criminality, evoking a long legacy of racialized policies and media portrayals that cast mexicanos and Chicanos as perpetually deportable. Note the hypocrisy in naming the people as illegal, when their forced removal without legal due process, is itself illegal. U.S. immigration policy—think Operation Wetback and the Bracero Program, have long simultaneously expelled and depended on Mexican labor. The enduring power of these tropes lies not just in law, but in sentiment—in the way migrants are imagined, portrayed, and ultimately policed in the public eye. Just as Hartman argues that the end of slavery did not mean the arrival of true freedom for Black Americans, so too have U.S. immigration policies failed to fully embrace immigrants as residents or neighbors and much less citizens. In both cases, legal status did not equate to genuine belonging or liberation.

What is notable in the current deployment of “illegality” in the @WhiteHouse post is its expanded scope: whereas earlier rhetoric primarily targeted Mexicans and Mexicanness this framing now extends to encompass all Latinx peoples, which always includes Black, Indigenous, Trans and Queer. This further intensifies prior waves of anti-Mexican sentiment while broadening the reach of criminalizing discourse. In doing so, it reinforces a racialized logic of illegality that casts an ever-widening net of suspicion and exclusion.

The MAGA White House’s broader propaganda – from the self-deport ads on Spanish-language media and Kristi Noem’s pinche photo-ops from CECOT (El Salvador’s infamous mega-prison) to SCOTUS attempts to revoke birthright citizenship – raises the stakes of listening, rendering our response—and our work as Latinx sound studies scholars—urgent. 

Like it or not, this video reshapes the contours of our field in real time. Using the ASMR video as a point of departure, we offer a mode of listening on the side of resistance—a practice that affirms our solidarity with migrants and their right to move, work, and live with dignity. Drawing on the work of the late María Lugones, we advocate for a practice of faithful witnessing—a listening attuned not only to sound, but to histories, structures, and acts of refusal that resist dehumanization.

Ofrenda

From Lugones’s book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions, she teaches that a collaborator witnesses from the side of power; a faithful witness stands with resistance even when it entails risk. And, to witness faithfully is to recognize and honor acts of resistance—even when doing so defies common sense of what we recognize as political acts/sounds. In Decolonizing Diasporas, Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez reminds us of the important coalitional sociality Lugones envisions in practicing faithful witnessing. For Figueroa, “the practice of faithful witnessing is one that oppressed and colonized peoples have deployed since time immemorial as a method of bearing witness to each other’s humanity even as they faced myriad forms of violence” (156). 

Faithful witnessing entails centering the plight of all MAGA political scapegoats, migrants in precarity, pro-Palestinian student activists, the still separated children, trans youth, women, and who ever is next on the Project 2025 agenda. Faithful witnessing is not about centering our own emotional response, but about coming together to listen, to bear witness, and to protect. In response to these distorted public signals, we present a suite of countersonics, shared in a lo-fi listening mode that enacts faithful witnessing and affirms our roles as co-resisters to sonic oppression. We conclude with a noise-filled, healing artifact: a sonic limpia for deep listening and a playlist to sustain the good fight.

FOR THE FULL PLAYLIST CLICK THIS LINK, OR START BELOW!

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Featured Image: Philly Immigrant May 1st, 2025 march for Justicia. Migrant workers and supporters rallied at 4th & Washington and marched in the streets to the AFL-CIO Mayday rally and march. Image by Joe Piette, cropped by SO! CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Wanda Alarcón is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research takes up sound as a generative site and method for hearing and amplifying resistant grammars in Chicana narratives. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, Chicana Soundscapes, which listens closely to sound, noise, language, songs, echoes, and silences, and proposes decolonial feminist ways of hearing Chicana and queer Chicana worlds.

Dolores Inés Casillas (she/her/ella) is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute (CSI) and Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. She is the author of Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014), co-editor of The Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge Press, 2016) and Feeling It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge Press, 2018).

Esther Díaz Martín  (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her book, Radiophonic Feminisms: Latina Voices in the Digital Age of Broadcasting, (UT Press, 2025) theorizes Chicana feminist listening and attends to the political work of Latina voices in contemporary sound media.

Sara Veronica Hinojos (she/her/ella) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Her research critically engages popular representations of Chicanxs and Latinxs as racialized, “accented” speakers. Her current book project, The Racial Politics of Chicana and Chicano Linguistic Scripts in Media (1925-2014), intentionally brings together language politics, digital media, humor studies  and sound studies.

Cloe Gentile Reyes (she/her/ella) is a queer Boricua scholar, poet, and perreo profa from Miami Beach. She is a Faculty Fellow in NYU’s Department of Music and has a PhD in Musicology from UC Santa Barbara. Her writing focuses on how Indigenous Caribbean femmes navigate intergenerational trauma and healing through decolonial sound, fashion, and dance. Her pieces have been featured in Sounding Out!, Intervenxions, and the womanist magazine, Brown Sugar Lit. 

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

“Oh how so East L.A.”: The Sound of 80s Flashbacks in Chicana Literature–Wanda Alarcón

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region–José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Xicanacimiento, Life-giving Sonics of Critical Consciousness–Esther Díaz Martín and Kristian E. Vasquez

Listening to Digitized “Ratatas” or “No Sabo Kids”–Sara Veronica Hinojos and Eliana Buenrostro

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body–Cloe Gentile Reyes

Latinx Soundwave Series–Edited by Dolores Inés Casillas