News from the Collective

“When I wake up, I can’t even stay up/I slept through the day, fuck/I’m not getting younger,” laments Willow Smith of The Anxiety on “Meet Me at Our Spot,” a track released through MSFTSMusic and Roc Nation in March of 2020. Despite the song’s nature as a “sludgy alternative track with emo undertones that hits at the zeitgeist,” “Meet Me at Our Spot” received very little attention after its initial release and did not chart until the summer of 2021, when it went viral on TikTok as part of a dance trend. The short-form video app which exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, catalyzed the track’s latent rise to success where it reached no. 21 on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming Willow’s highest charting song since her 2010 hit, “Whip My Hair”.

The app currently known as TikTok began as Musical.ly, which was shuttered in 2017 and then rebranded in 2018. By March of 2021, the app boasted one billion worldwide monthly users, indicative of a growth rate of about 180%. This explosion was in many ways catalyzed by successive lockdowns during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the relaxation and subsequent abandonment of COVID mitigation measures, the app has retained a large volume of its users, remaining one of the highest grossing apps in the iOS environment. TikTok’s viral success (both as noun and adjective) has worked to create a kind of vibe economy in which artists are now subject to producing a particular type of sound in order to be rendered legible to the pop charts.

For anyone who has yet to succumb to the TikTok trap, allow me to offer you a brief summary of how it functions. Upon opening it, you are instantly fed content. Devoid of any obvious internal operating logic, it is the media equivalent of drinking from a fire hose. Immersive and fast-paced, users vertically scroll through videos that take up their entire screen. Within five minutes of swiping, you can–if your algorithm is anything like mine–see: cute pet videos, protests against police brutality, HypeHouse dance trends, thirst traps, contemporary music, therapy tips, attractive men chopping wood, attractive women lifting weights, and anything else you can fathom. Since its shift from Musical.ly, the app has also been a staging ground for popular music hits such as Lil Nas X’s’ “Old Town Road”, Lizzo’s “Good As Hell”, and, recently, Harry Styles’ “As It Was.”

The app, which is the perfect–if chaotic–fusion of both radio and video is enmeshed in a wider media ecosystem where social networking and platform capitalism converge, and as a result, it seems that TikTok is changing the music industry in at least three distinct ways:

First, it affects our music consumption habits. After hearing a snippet of a song used for a TikTok, users are more likely to queue it up on their streaming platform of choice for another, more complete listen. Unlike those platforms, where algorithms work to feed a listener more of what they’ve already heard, TikTok feeds a listener new content. As a result, there’s no definitive likelihood that you’ve previously heard the track being used as a sound. Therefore, TikTok works the way that Spotify used to: as a mechanism for discovery.

Second, TikTok is changing the nature of the single. Rather than relying upon a label as the engine behind a song’s success, TikTok disseminates tracks–or sounds as they’re referred to in the app–widely, determining a song’s success or role as a debut within a series of clicks. Particularly during the pandemic, when musicians were unable to tour, TikTok’s relationship to the industry became even more salient. Artists sought new ways to share and promote their music, taking to TikTok to release singles, livestream concerts, and engage with fans. Moreover, Spotify’s increasingly capacious playlist archive began to boast a variety of tracklists with titles such as, “Best TikTok Songs 2019-2022”, “TikTok Songs You Can’t Get Out Of Your Head”, and “TikTok Songs that Are Actually Good” among others. The creation and maintenance of this feedback loop between TikTok and Spotify demonstrates not only the centrality of social media ecosystems as driving current popular music success, but also the way that these technologies work in harmony to promote, sustain, or suppress interest in a particular tune.

Most notoriously, the bridge of Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license”, went viral as a sound on TikTok in January 2021 and subsequently almost broke the internet. Critics have praised this 24-second section as the highlight of the song, underscoring Rodrigo’s pleading soprano vocals layered over moody, syncopated digital drums. Shortly after it was released, the song shattered Spotify’s record for single-day streams for a non-holiday song. New York Times writer Joe Coscarelli notes of Rodrigo’s success, “TikTok videos led to social media posts, which led to streams, which led to news articles , and back around again, generating an unbeatable feedback loop.”

And third, where songwriting was once oriented towards the creation of a narrative, TikTok’s influence has led artists to a songwriting practice that centers on producing a mood. For The New Yorker, Kyle Chayka argues that vibes are “a rebuke to the truism that people want narratives,” suggesting that the era of the vibe indicates a shift in online culture. He argues that what brings people online is the search for “moments of audiovisual eloquence,” not narrative. Thus, on the one hand, media have become more immersive in order to take us out of our daily preoccupations. On the other, media have taken on a distinct shape so that they can be engaged while doing something else. In other words, media have adapted to an environment wherein the dominant mode of consumption is keyed toward distraction via atmosphere.

Despite their relatively recent resurgence in contemporary discourse, vibes have a rich conceptual history in the United States. Once a shorthand for “vibration” endemic to West Coast hippie vernacular, “vibes” have now come to mean almost anything. In his work on machine learning and the novel form, Peli Grietzer theorizes the vibe by drawing on musician Ezra Koenig’s early aughts blog, “Internet Vibes.” Koenig writes, “A vibe turns out to be something like “local colour,” with a historical dimension. What gives a vibe “authenticity” is its ability to evoke–using a small number of disparate elements–a certain time, place, and milieu, a certain nexus of historic, geographic, and cultural forces.” In his work for Real Life, software engineer Ludwig Yeetgenstein defines the vibe as “something that’s difficult to pin down precisely in words but that’s evoked by a loose collection of ideas, concepts, and things that can be identified by intuition rather than logic.” Where Mitch Thereiau argues that the vibe might just merely be a vocabulary tick of the present moment, Robin James suggests that vibes are not only here to stay, but have in fact been known by many other names before. Black diasporic cultures, in particular, have long believed sound and its “vibrations had the power to produce new possibilities of social attunement and new modes of living,” as Gayle Wald’s “Soul Vibrations: Black Music and Black Freedom in Sound and Space,” attests (674). We might then consider TikTok a key method of dissemination for a maximalist, digital variant of something like Martin Heidegger’s concept of mood (stimmung), or Karen Tongson’s “remote intimacy.” The vibe is both indeterminate and multiple, a status to be achieved and the mood that produces it; vibes seek to promote and diffuse feelings through time and space.

Much current discourse around vibes insists that they interfere with, or even discourage academic interpretation. While some people are able to experience and identify the vibe—perform a vibe check, if you will—vibes defy traditional forms of academic analysis. As Vanessa Valdés points out, “In a post-Enlightenment world that places emphasis on logic and reason, there exists a demand that everything be explained, be made legible.” That the vibe works with a certain degree of strategic nebulousness might in fact be one of its greatest assets.

Vibes resist tidy classification and can thus be named across a variety of circumstances and conditions. Although we might think of the action of ‘vibing’ as embodied, and the term vibration quite literally refers to the physical properties of sound waves and their travel through various mediums, the vibe through which those actions are produced does not itself have to be material. Sometimes, they name a genre of feeling or energy: cursed vibes or cottagecore vibes. Sometimes, they function as a statement of identification: I vibe with that, or in the case of 2 Chainz’s 2016 hit, “it’s a vibe.” Sometimes, vibes are exchanged: you can give one, you can catch one, you can check one, So, while things like energy and mood—which are often taken as cognates for vibes—work to imagine, name, and evoke emotions, vibes are instead invitations.

Not only do vibes serve as a prompt for an attempt at articulating experience, they are also invitations to co-presently experience what seems inarticulable. By capturing patterns in media and culture in order to produce a coherent image/sound assemblage, the production of a vibe is predicated upon the ability to draw upon large swathes of visual, aural, and environmental data. Take for example, the story of Nathan Apodaca, known by his TikTok handle as: 420doggface208. After posting a video of himself listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” while drinking cranberry juice and riding a longboard, Apodaca went viral, amassing something like 30 million views in mere hours. This subsequently sparked a trend in which TikTok users posted videos of themselves doing the same thing, using “Dreams” as the sound. According to Billboard, this sparked the largest ever streaming week for Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit with over 8.47 million streams. Of his overnight success, Apodaca says, “it’s just a video that everyone felt a vibe with.” To invoke a vibe is thus to make a particular atmosphere more comprehensible to someone else, producing a resonant effect that draws people together.

As both an extension and tool of culture, vibes are produced by and imbricated within broader social, political, and economic matrices. Recorded music has always been confined—for better and worse—to the technologies, formats, and mediums through which it has been produced for commercial sale. On a platform like TikTok, wherein the emphasis is on potentially quirky microsections of songs, artists are invited to key their work towards those parameters in order to maximize commercial success. Nowadays, pop songs are produced with an eye towards their ability to go viral, be remixed, re-released with a feature verse, meme’d, or included in a mashup. As such, when an artist ‘blows up’ on TikTok, it does not necessarily mean that the sound of the song is good (whatever that might mean). Rather, it might instead be the case that a hybrid assemblage of sound, performance, narrative, and image has coalesced successfully into an atmosphere or texture – that we recognize as a/the vibe – something that not only resonates but also sells well. As TikTok’s success continues to proliferate, the app is continually being developed in ways that make it an indispensable part of the popular music industry’s ecosystem. Whether by exposing users to new musical content through the circulation of sounds, or capitalizing upon the speed at which the app moves to brand a song a ‘single’ before it’s even released, TikTok leverages the vibe to get users to listen differently.

@jimmyfallon This one’s for you @420doggface208 #cranberrydreams#doggface208#dogfacechallenge♬ original sound – Jimmy Fallon

We might indeed consider vibes to be conceptual, affective algorithms created in the interstice between lived experience and new media. “Meet Me At Our Spot,” the track through which I’ve framed this article, is full of allusions to youth culture: drunk texts, anxiety over aging, and late-night drives on the 405. It is buoyed by a propulsive bass line that thumps with a restless energy and evokes a mood of escapism. Willow Smith’s intriguing timbre and the pleasing harmonies she achieves with Tyler Cole invite listeners to ride shotgun. For the two minutes and twenty-two seconds of the song, we are immersed within their world. In the final measures the pop of the snare recedes into the background and Tyler’s voice fades away. The vibe of the track – both sonically and thematically – is predicated on the experience of a few, fleeting moments. Willow leaves us with a final provocation, one that resonates with popular music’s current mode: “Caught a vibe, baby are you coming for the ride?”

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Featured Image: Screencap of Nathan Apodaca’s viral TikTok post, courtesy of SO! eds.

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Jay Jolles is a PhD candidate in American Studies at the College of William and Mary currently at work on a dissertation tentatively titled “Man, Music, and Machine: Audio Culture in a/the Digital Age.” He is an interdisciplinary scholar with interests in a wide range of fields including 20th and 21st century literature and culture, critical theory, comparative media studies, and musicology. Jay’s scholarly work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Los Angeles Review of Books, U.S. Studies Online, and Comparative American Studies. His essays can be found in Per Contra, The Atticus Review, and Pidgeonholes, among others. Prior to his time at William and Mary, he was an adjunct professor of English at Drexel University and Rutgers University-Camden.

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

Listen to yourself!: Spotify, Ancestry DNA, and the Fortunes of Race Science in the Twenty-First Century”–Alexander W. Cohen

Evoking the Object: Physicality in the Digital Age of Music–-Primus Luta

“Music is not Bread: A Comment on the Economics of Podcasting”-Andreas Duus Pape

“Pushing Record: Labors of Love, and the iTunes Playlist”–Aaron Trammell

Critical bandwidths: hearing #metoo and the construction of a listening public on the web–Milena Droumeva

TiK ToK: Post-Crash Party Pop, Compulsory Presentism and the 2008 Financial Collapse—Dan DiPiero (The other “TikTok”! The people need to know!)

Theory on Demand #47

Failurists – When Things Go Awry

Edited by Sybille Lammes, Kat Jungnickel, Larissa Hjorth & Jen Rae

Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in fields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies, privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, film, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds.

Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored.

In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways.

In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated?

Contributors: Jessamy Perriam, Emma Fraser & Clancy Wilmott, Kat Jungnickel, Annette N. Markham, Anna Hickey-Moody, Linda Dement, Jen Rae & Claire G. Coleman, Julienne van Loon & Kelly Hussey-Smith, Li Jönsson & Kristina Lindström, Sam Hind, Lekshmy Parameswaran, Syrus Marcus Ware, Nanna Verhoeff & Iris van der Tuin, Olivia Khoo, Grace McQuilten, Chantal Faust, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Sybille Lammes, Larissa Hjorth, Kate McLean and Julienne van Loon.

Order and Download a copy HERE

Sound has a peculiar relationship to mindfulness; zoning in and out, active and passive forms of listening while we situate our listening practices alongside other daily activities. Especially when it comes to driving, listening to something or someone or just singing aloud by myself, I have realized, helps me drown out other noises of alertness. Over the years I have come to value background music or chatter and especially radio programming that takes the burden of curation and scheduling off my back, in all sorts of tasks that require deep concentration. Enough and more has been said about the visual-bias in various forms of ethnographic inquiry (see Andrew C. Sparkes’s “Ethnography and the senses” for a good example). Without belaboring these arguments, I also find that knowing through listening and listening as a mode of non-haptic yet immersive and intimate engagement can also prove to be a fruitful method of inquiry, especially in our post-pandemic worlds, where it feels a lot harder to establish intimacy. The United Nations noted that radio, in particular, “provided solace” during that period of physical distancing  and social isolation.

For me, radio sparked my accidental realization and foregrounding of sonic methods as an itinerant means of getting to know new things, people and surroundings in life and research when I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-2022 to start a new position as a postdoctoral researcher. Knowing that I would continue living in California for the near future, after eight long years of having deferred driving in America, I decided to learn driving and buy a car. I was also especially excited to be moving to Sunnyvale, a city in the Southern Peninsula, located between more known places like Palo Alto and San Jose. Sunnyvale is often jokingly called the desi capital, perhaps the most Indian of any ‘Little India’ you could find in America. As shorthand, desi, a Hindi word,refers to anyone and everything with ties to the South Asian subcontinent. In more recent years, the term has gained currency especially among South Asian diasporic communities to self-refer to culture, music, food, often to signify the presence and strength of transnational ties (between India and their countries of settlement).

What I hadn’t anticipated was that driving brought about a new connection to the medium of radio, as I started tuning in to take my mind off the jitters that come with the new sounds of an automobile-dependent region: fast moving rubber hitting the freeway tarmac and the lane changes and the scalar adjustments that demand driving tens of miles to ensure you still have a social life stitched together across the vastness of California. I began to find the act of tuning in and out of stations fascinating, especially how the radio as a device holds the parallel realities of so many people with different interests, languages and politics together but separate.  Scholarship and even casual listening shows that non-English radio stations catering to various immigrant and other communities have existed for a long time in the US and elsewhere (I wish pondering the sonic geographies of  Radio Garden, a web-based map interface that allows listeners to access any free-to-air radio stations across the world, wasn’t beyond the scope of this post!). Both as an ethnographer and as an insider-outsider within the larger Indian immigrant and diaspora community (but a newcomer to the Bay Area), tuning into the local desi radio station while driving offered me a good way to enter the desi community of the Bay Area, to know what it means to be desi and perform Indianness in 2022, in a place where I regularly see so many Indians and South Asians every single day.

As a friend who recently visited me in Sunnyvale remarked as we waited for our table at the always-busy Madras Cafe, Sunnyvale feels so much like India! And I felt it too; what she was referring to was not only the very visible presence of Indian people all around town or the abundance of restaurants catering to various sub-regional cuisines from India. What felt different to me here was how relaxed everyone looked in grocery stores, restaurants and elsewhere, how utterly remade Sunnyvale is as a pan-Asian but mostly Indian space that even the smallest performances of fitting in feel unnecessary.  In fact, shopping her reminded me of a point Purnima Mankekar’s Indian narrators made in her iconic essay on Indian grocery shopping in the San Francisco Bay Area (2010), that Indian stores in Sunnyvale and Milpitas as places where “white people look out of place” as compared to the ones in Berkeley.

The juxtaposition of the non-performances and the weight of being comfortably in place in a community like Sunnyvale only settles on the mind and body very slowly, like a faint but familiar smell from home. Words and demands often stumble out of my mouth at the grocery store, as if I am allowed and I will be completely understood.  Immigrant life in America is steeped in language acrobatics, balancing being understood with becoming deliberately opaquely incomprehensible, using one accent for the ones from home, one for those who make you feel at home, and then the American accent for the Americans outside.  The contrast of places like Sunnyvale, Fremont, Milpitas and other similar Northern California cities that have been transformed by immigrant presence is not just one of tangible and observable things, but sonic markers too, like Bolly 92.3FM.

Bolly 92.3FM is the default desiradio station that services the entire San Francisco Bay Area. As the name suggests, for the most part the station plays popular Bollywood songs from recently released movies and albums, but just as other stations do in India, Bolly92.3FM leverages its listener demographics at different times of the day to also play classics and hits from older Hindi films during late night slots. Interestingly, as the presenters repeat the station name and jingle time and again, they also remind you that you are listening to Bay Area’s Bollywood station owned by the Silicon Valley Asian media network. The name Bolly92.3FM is a play on the broad familiarity with Bollywood in the US even as Indian audiences globally have moved away from the older connotations of Bollywood as North Indian cinema with song, dance and people dressed in flashy clothes. Much like the hyper-authentic Indian restaurants that serve regional cuisines such as Andhra, Tamil, Gujarati, Rajasthani and Marathi food to their loyal and affording immigrant patrons, Bolly92.3FM has also configured its programming to cater to different regional and linguistic communities from India in the Bay Area. For instance, Saturday morning and afternoon slots are dedicated to Telugu programs—everything is in Telugu (language) from the hosts discussions to the songs being played as well as the actual topics being discussed—as if the station turns into a different station with the implicit acknowledgement of the substantial cultural presence and possibly the sonic and financial power of Telugu listeners among the wider Indian community here. There are similar slots dedicated to Gujarati language programming.

In addition  to language and topical interests, listening to Bolly92.3FM has been instructive in getting a feel for communal desires, aspirations and anxieties through its advertisement. There are fellow desi real estate agents, tax planners, dentists, travel agencies and coaching centers, each signaling to why they are trustworthy. Some remind their audiences of their shared cultural background as key to them being able to understand their customers’ needs, others also indicate their familiarity with America: one realtor is the only Indian-origin person to feature in a top realtor list, another tax planner’s family has been in the US for three generations and thus he is well aware of the nitty-gritties of transnational estate planning. A known Indian-origin realtor in the area even sponsors his own radio show on the weekends where he takes questions from prospective home buyers and sellers. Before and beyond giving them financial advice, he often explains how fellow Indian immigrants think about financial opportunities, investments, how they might seek social validation from fellow Indians who might see their home and so on. He weaves in such exposition before talking dry financial facts about mortgages. The same tax planner and his co-host occasionally offer historical accounts of changing real estate trends, how certain places used to be affordable for Indian immigrant buyers and how new places are becoming of interest as vacation homes for more affluent Indian immigrants.

Hearing the tax planners and real estate agents plot these dynamic and speculative maps of South Asian financial, cultural and political futures week-after-week felt like witnessing what many historical texts on migration within the Bay Area have described as waves in the past.  As I mentioned earlier, Sunnyvale is not the only ‘Little India’ in the Bay Area, let alone in California, but rather, is a more recent iconic place in the Indian and South Asian diaspora map where the younger and newer immigrants are finding homes. Fremont, Milpitas, and Hayward in the East Bay closer to Oakland, and San Jose in the South Bay, saw similar waves of Indian immigrant settlements in the past, many of whom now far more affluent than their younger counterparts. In my short time since moving here, I learned both from conversations with friends who grew up in the area as well as from communication scholar Anne Marie Todd’s work on the past and present of Santa Clara Valley, this region has not only seen waves of migration from settlers across the world but with each incoming wave and turn in occupational trends from farming to railroads to IT work. Multiple communities have remade cities in the Bay Area over the decades.

I also find advertisements as well as talk shows interesting because they offer a more proximate and concentrated triangulation of otherwise scattered, overheard communal talk – I’ve heard things about Indian immigrants and real estate, their aspirations for their children to get into Ivy league colleges. I have also been asked at the grocery store if I know people looking to get married; I’ve overheard aunties at the grocery store consulting each other about dealing with death, financial loss, planetary alignments and more. But it is through the radio that these private interests, anxieties and futures take more collective and articulate forms.

To speak, to be heard, and to be understood as intended are as important as visual representation to allow for feeling in place in the world and for feeling at home in the United States. Very simply put, in the American context, while Black and Brown vocal expression and volume or the stereotype of loudness have been historically stigmatized as a part of the larger racist depiction of ‘unruly’ bodies, various forms of Asian speech, languages and expression including loudness but also silence and the absence of vocality, have also been racialized against the backdrop of white socio-linguistic normativity.  Specifically, Indian and South Asian immigrants have been repeatedly represented in popular American culture as muted characters whose interiority is either irrelevant to the plot or cannot be accessed. Think of Raj Koothrappali from the show The Big Bang Theory, an accomplished scientist at the prestigious Caltech university who loses his voice around women. In accounts of Indian tech workers in the US from the Y2K era, one finds multiple articles casting them as the back-office worker – good at laborious and boring work but not presentation material. Some of these stereotypes have changed and splintered as more South Asians technologists have gone on to become successful executives and leaders in US companies, but vocality as a form of publicity can be crucial to sonic forms of belonging.

When I arrived in the Bay Area, I was still trying to figure out how to form a community and how to immerse myself in the desi community here, somewhat selfishly to get a glimpse of how Indian presence is remaking the Valley, not only through IT work but also through cultural and political performances. But I also wanted to get to know people, be known by people around. Olakhita means “people known to us” in Gujarati, my mother tongue; in Hindi jaan-pehchaan means to be in each other’s knowing that gives you some claim and affiliation over others without deep intimacy, not quite acquaintances or neighbors like in the American context. Apart from the numerous Whatsapp and Facebook groups aimed at desifolks living in the same neighborhood or city, Bolly92.3FM acts as a beacon for Indians and South Asians spread across San Francisco, the East Bay and the South Bay areas, offering a medium for the various Indian associations and event organizers to reach out to thousands and invite them to Diwali, Dussehra and other festival celebrations as well as any major concerts by visiting Indian artists in the area.

This is the far from the first or only time that a radio station has facilitated the forging of affective ties and social and material connections in diaspora. Rather this post recounts how active and passive listening to and through the station revealed over time how much South Asian presence has transformed the Bay Area. I attended the massive Diwali and Dussehra events advertised on 92.3, and once there, I could recognize so many of the organizers and sponsors’ names – some of them were the same tax planners and realtors that also run ads and sponsored segments on the station. One week in late September, an ad played on the radio, announcing that a famous hotel in downtown San Jose was now able to accommodate more than a thousand guests and offer a special entryway for the baraat procession (when the groom’s party of a few hundred comes dancing up to the wedding venue). The ad ended with the contact details of a South Asian representative of the hotel who could handle all queries related to Indian wedding arrangements!  Bolly92.3FM mediates and shapes the collective desi identity through its programming and advertising, in turn also stitching, materializing and rendering visible a map of the Indian community spread across dozens of non-contiguous cities and neighborhoods in the Bay Area.

It bears noting, however, that the idea of Indianness or desi-ness (an imagined brotherhood among all the expats here) advanced through the radio programs, advertisements as well as the cultural celebrations, is very much a nationalistic and Hindu-dominant one. Although India is an ethnically, linguistically and culturally diverse country and not all people of Indian origin in the Bay Area are Hindu, the radio announcers never really celebrate or discuss Eid, Christmas, or Thanksgiving as events of possible interest. Just based on what is said and what is left unsaid, the dominant self-imagination of the Bay Area desi community as advanced through the radio station feels like it quietly aligns with the dominant religious and political imagination of India as Hindu, middle-class, post-religious and post-caste.   

In the process of seeing this map render in my own imagination through regular listening, I also realized how this form of distant listening replicated the mode of jaan-pehchan (getting to know) for the itinerant immigrant-ethnographer. There is always the pre-fieldwork moment, the slightly promiscuous exploratory moment of getting to know and immersing oneself before one can articulate stakes and research questions. It is also often a period of deep uncertainty and ambivalence, since, as ethnographers, responsibility for and towards our field, communities, and interlocutors is always at the center of every project. We are always reminded not to be extractive and to think deeply about power relations even as we attempt to forge meaningful ties with those whom we want to observe and learn from and write about. Much like other visa-workers and international scholars in US academia, being a non-citizen ethnographer engenders multiple kinds of precarities—there is no straightforward or replicable guidebook on how to establish rapport, gain access, build trust and more with a community. More importantly, the itinerant-immigrant ethnographer’s relationships are also always interrupted, prone to arbitrary border restrictions and chronic deracination.

In the early days of digital ethnography, Kate Crawford powerfully argued to reframe acts of lurking (silently and passively hanging out in online communities) as forms of listening and by extension, listening as a concomitant and constitutive practice when we consider participation as speaking or having a voice. In the case of diasporic radio, as I realized, not only is the act of listening quite literal but it also affords and reinforces the vitality of different modes of agentic power and participation, those marked by ambivalence, yet-to-be gained legitimacy; forms of minor participation if you will. Via Crawford, listening and/as lurking also emerges as specifically racially inflected modes of agentic participation against the backdrop of media policy and the emphasis on free expression and speech as the ultimate realization of democratic power.

Among diasporic communities and further among itinerant immigrants within those communities, listening, overhearing and eavesdropping become the de facto modes of democratic and communitarian participation.  Listening to the radio as a way of immersion is not a solution to these enduring dilemmas of ethical ethnography but to borrow from the analogy of Californian driving, listening to the radio, just like other forms of digital and analog lurking, allowed me an ‘on-ramp’ to gradually merge and embed myself in the larger South Asian diasporic community.

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Featured Image: “Driving” by Flickr User AnnaNakami (CC BY-NC 2.0)

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Noopur Raval is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in understanding global futures of work, the life and work decisions made by immigrant workers in tech companies, changing values and moral norms and projects of personhood especially in postcolonial settings. Noopur received a PhD in Informatics from University of California Irvine (UCI) in September 2020 and, through July 2022 was a postdoc researcher at the AI Now Institute at New York University. Noopur is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz – Silicon Valley Extension in the Computational Media department, working with Dr Norman Su. In Fall 2023, Noopur will join the Department of Information Studies at UCLA as an assistant professor.

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

“Gendered Soundscapes of India, an Introduction“–Monika Mehta and Praseeda Gopinath

The Queer Sound of the Dandiya Queen, Falguni Pathak–-Pavitra Sundar

“Out of Sync: Gendered Location Sound Work in Bollywood“—Priya Jaikumar

SO! LA: Sounding the California Story–Bridget Hoida

“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn–David Goren

Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-language Radio–Dolores Inés Casillas

This summer Hackers & Designers are going to inhabit a remote location in the south of the Netherlands and are looking for 20-30 co-inhabitants for our temporary H&D village!

Together we will embark on the adventure of learning, making and living together. With this format we aim for a holistic and intersectional way of thinking about and practicing sustainability (socially, ecologically, economically, culturally) and reknit arbitrary boundaries between work, play, leisure, maintenance and care.

H&D is now open for proposals for a variety of activities that contribute to an overall exhilarating communal experience! More specifically we are looking for hands-on workshops that explore alternative (sustainable, non-extractivist, equitable) technical and social imaginaries. Next to workshop proposals additional activities are welcome such as lectures, film and dance nights, communal dinners, fire place readings, foraging, publishing activities, gymnastics, LARP….

The open call welcomes folks (hackers/designers/makers/artists/developers/activists/inventors/…) of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to propose activities. The BYOW (bring your own workshop) format is an attempt to decentralize curation and organization of the workshop program.

More info here, deadline for application is 3 April.

A strange shift has overcome NGOs, academia and philanthropy working in the digital politics and culture spheres – a long held commitment to freedom of expression has been overtaken by a new consensus that accepts actively shaping and removing ‘unacceptable’ ideas and information. What is unacceptable or untrue tends to change weekly, if not more often.

This ‘shaping’ is often done under the guise of combating ‘disinformation’, an overfunded industry that has spawned hundreds of “Centers for the study of x,y, and z”. Huge amounts of money have been piped in from the foundation world, and even more, has come from government. The justification is ‘public health’ or ‘safety’, however, the Twitter files reveal that scaled, this approach has the exact opposite effect. It is Orwellian, to be kind.

I have spent the last several weeks supporting journalist Matt Taibbi to develop Twitter Files releases #18 and #19.

Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort led by the Stanford Internet Observatory that brought together elite academia, NGOs, government, and experts in AI and social media monitoring, with six of the biggest social media companies on the planet. They went far beyond their “misinformation” remit. Twitter Files show the Virality Project pushed platforms to censor “stories of true vaccine side effects”.

Partnered in the effort were Facebook/Instagram, Google/YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Medium, and Twitter. In partnership with Pentagon and DARPA funded companies, the Virality Project was able to surveil all these platforms using machine learning systems.

The academic ethics of this should always have been dubious.

The result was an approach that sought to control narrative rather highlight untruths. For example, reporting side effects of the now-pulled Johnson & Johnson vaccine would have been labelled “misinformation”. Had Kerryn Phelps (the first female president of the Australian Medical Association) taken to Twitter to describe her and her wife’s vaccine injuries, these too would have been labelled misinformation. German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach would have also been censored for admitting that as a result of the vaccines “there are severe disabilities, and some of them will be permanent”. (Video)

Rather than listening out for safety signals to protect the public, leaders in the “anti-disinformation” field ran cover to protect BigPharma.

The Virality Project, however, is just part of a broader cultural shift that reverses long-standing liberal/left commitments to free expression and allows censorship in the name of protection and safety. However in suppressing “stories of true vaccine side effects” the Virality Project put people in danger.

The centrality of censorship ideology to the digital rights field is illustrated in former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden opening RightsCon 2022, the sector’s biggest civil society event. Ardern claims that “weapons of war” and “disinformation” are one and the same. EngageMedia (of which I was previously Executive Director) co-organised RightsCon in 2015 in the Philippines.

RightsCon 2022 also heavily promoted US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. Blinken oversees the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, one of the most egregious US government promoters of “anti-disinformation” as censorship. (See Twitter Files #17)

Western leaders that advocate for censorship in the name of “disinformation” severely undermine those fighting authoritarian regimes around the world. Those regimes frequently evoke the threat of “fake news” to justify their crackdowns.

I encourage you to read both releases in full and hold what you have been told about Elon Musk just for a moment. Musk is neither hero nor demon. The Twitter Files however are a critical catalyst to challenge the new censorship regime we now live under and reinvigorate the movement for free expression.

(Note that I am a paid consultant for Matt Taibbi and have no relation whatsoever to Musk).

If you can walk and chew gum you’ll know that uncovering liberal/left corruption doesn’t imply support for the reactionary right.

Free speech and expression protect us from the most powerful actors on the planet; corporations, the State, and a growing plethora of international bodies. Ultimately we need radically decentralised social media that is more immune to their capture.

Some amount of ‘disinformation’ studies is legitimate, however, the Twitter Files demonstrate that a major part has been weaponised to censor and smear political opposition. A kind of digital McCarthyism.

Academia and NGOs need to take a good look at their ‘disinformation’ programs and evaluate to what degree they are being weaponised to censor unpopular ideas from people deemed worthy of being censored.

The frequent missed calls by government and the media during the pandemic should make it clear that no one has a monopoly on truth. If we cannot re-open conversation (however difficult) as our primary method of truth-seeking we will continue our march into an epistemological totalitarianism.

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Andrew Lowenthal is a Research Affiliate at the Institute of Network Cultures. He is the co-founder and former Executive Director of EngageMedia, former fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

By Franco Berardi

Who wrote this text? Me or Franco Berardi? Peter Gabriel says the question is irrelevant.

One year ago the visionary musician Peter Gabriel released a book titled Reverberation, a sort of technophile introduction to the science behind deep listening.

“Reverberation is the impact a sound makes after the sound has stopped,” explains Peter Gabriel. Grab hold of any sound and hang on tight, you’ll be amazed how far it reverberates and where you end up.

Now, in an interview with yahoo Gabriel speaks of Artificial Intelligence and the future of music.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/peter-gabriel-on-the-future-of-ai-we-might-as-well-just-grab-the-algorithms-and-dance-with-them-rather-than-fight-them-203833247.html

The recent innovations in the field of Artificial intelligence sound alarming for artists designers, musicians, and writers too.

Someone told me that chatbot is able to compose the kind of capricious essays that I usual write.

For days I refrained from asking to chatbot GPT: “write a whimsical essay about Peter Gabriel and Artificial intelligence in the style of Franco Berardi.”

Then what?

What if the text you are reading is the reply of a chatbot to the question above?

Who knows?

And also: who cares?

Now I wonder: “Should I be afraid of the next steps in deployment of the Cognitive automaton? Should I fight against the invading Artificial intelligence that is stealing jobs to creative workers? Should I be congratulate with the talking and writing machine?

So far I am unable to answer this question.

However I may ask the question to the chatbot himself (or herself).

Gabriel suggests to take it easy. He knows that what’s happening in the field of automation of cognition is huge and it is evolving fast, too fast for conscious control.

Gabriel writes: “this is something that’s going have way more impact than the Industrial Revolution and the nuclear bomb. So, if we don’t start anticipating what it might do, it’s going to be too late, because it’s very fast.”

Then he says:

“Some would argue [that you can’t replace] the [human] spirit — but I think there are probably going to be algorithms for the spirit, too! So, we might as well just grab the algorithms and dance with them, rather than fight them. … Unfortunately, I don’t think my job or anyone’s job is safe from AI.”

I don’t know what Gabriel means by the word ”spirit”. But I know that my sensible and sensitive point of view is my own experience.

The chatbot is already able to write a love letter, and is able to perform the behavior of a human in love. Of course it can do it: he has read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina so it is able to recombine relevant information and utter a seductive enunciation. But the chatbot is not experiencing that kind of disquieting exciting affect.

Affect is beyond its capabilities.

But Gabriel gets intimidating:

“It’s coming whether we like it or not, so we might as well try and work with it rather than work against it, and make sure that there are programs in there that protect ethics and some sort of morality. “

The story of an ethical regulation of the intelligent technology is untenable. For centuries we have been discussing ethical rules,  ethical politics, ethical values. We did not reach any agreement.

Who will decide about moral and political alternatives? Who will establish the ethical rules governing artificial intelligence? Who will decide the limits of its military use?

Artificial intelligence itself?

The Gabriel conclusion, however, is incontrovertible:

“ If an intelligent species is so smart that it can destroy itself, it very often does. I hope we don’t fall into that trap, but we can have a wonderful party on the way to jumping over the cliff.”

We have deserved our own termination, and the extinction of human civilization that is underway.

Don’t be sad for this inconvenient detail.

On Wednesday 8 March 2023, Amsterdam Alternative is organising a discussion on collective digital property. This AA Talk is organised in the context of the web documentary AA is making about collective ownership. During this evening, we will discuss what digital collective ownership is or can be. We will discuss ideas that deal with ownership, use, management, community, knowledge and development around digital assets. Think cables, servers, systems, applications, hosting, privacy, social media, hacking, open source and licensing. Where do we make it collective and where do we run into limits?

Doors open: 19:30
Discussion: 20:00-22:00
Drinks at the bar: 22:00-23:00
Entrance: free
Language: Nederlands/English (mixed)
Location: Ventilator Cinema, 2nd floor OT301, Overtoom 301, Amsterdam

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We need to Collectivise the Internet

We cannot continue on the current path. That should be obvious. And if not, here’s a refresher paragraph: The internet is the old capitalist game in a new silicon jacket. The colonialization of our attention created a dependency a drug dealer would envy. Half the world despairs when WhatsApp goes down. Old capitalism with old interests hunts for new digital countries to suck dry every day. And as we get sucked into the whirlpool of Google, Meta and Apple, we lose the imagination that technology could also be different. We can no longer even imagine that a phone is not a rectangular piece of black glass. And that you wouldn’t carry it with you all the time. Can we still imagine a world where our sleep time is longer than our screen time? Many an activist could better imagine the end of the world than the end of the internet.

It is time for a collective digital striptease. Collectively, layer by layer, we toss the old internet onto the smouldering heaps of burnt plastic, melting copper and tiny sparkling bits of cobalt. We reject the apps and websites that parasitise our behaviour. We no longer tell our deepest secrets through chat apps that eavesdrop on us, and politely thank cheap electro junk that lasts only a year, but does continue to slow down the world before and after use.

Interest is the main reason for doing this. Whose interest? Whose interest does the internet serve? Is the app there for me, or for shareholders? Is the social network for us to talk to friends, or for ad networks and troll factories to trick society into behaving differently? Whose interest is served by using Google docs? Does a dating app earn more from me if I do or do not find the love of my life? Whose interest is being served? This a crucial question. Unfortunately, manufacturers of modern tech do everything they can to hide and disguise their interests. Easier than continuing to poke around in their annual reports and hoping for whistleblowers is to simply dismiss these unholy conflicts of interest. Just as we did before with collective housing and food co-ops, technology can also be made, managed and used in the best interests of yourself and your community. Then you know for sure how it works, why it works that way and what you get out of it.

And you don’t have to go and invent that yourself. Many have gone before us. We can learn from their work. Also, parts of the internet have never been colonised. These free ports have special powers that we can put to use elsewhere. But first, let me sketch out the landscape where we can start realising our collective dreams: On the one hand, the internet is ephemeral and intangible: the software side.

You use apps and websites. The apps come from an App Store. The websites need a browser. Appstore and browser run on an operating system. In addition, there are agreements about how these apps and websites get and send the information; the protocols of the Internet govern those agreements and we know them by such unimaginative names as HTTP, IMAP, IRC, ETC. (That last one is the protocol that indicates to the reader that there are many more, but I don’t feel like listing them all). Information comes and goes from your own computer to other computers.

And that’s the other side: the internet is also very material. Your computer and smartphone are made of plastic, steel and some other materials from China. The country where they bought in a few thousand different components from around the world to make the laptop. While your own computer is a lovingly cared-for, little thing that gets all the attention, the servers are crammed like boxed calves by the thousands in huge halls full of noise from cooling systems. The data centres are concrete and steel juggernauts, dependent on electricity from power plants, solar panels or windmills. Cables, modems, switches and eventually even thick submarine cables and satellites connect it all together.

The material side and the software side are also intimately intertwined. The smartphone in your pocket is many times more powerful than the computer that opinions used 10 years ago. There is enough power in it to probably provide you with all your computing needs for the rest of your life. But with the economic realities of updates and lack of support for old models, in a few years you will already have a new one. New hardware enables new software and vice versa.

Where do you start if you and your collective want to become owners of your own digital production resources?

There are free havens and settlements of resistance we can visit for inspiration. Some are older than the internet itself. They are websites made for the common good like Indymedia, it is an app like Mastodon, or a collection of services like those of Lurk.org or vvvvvaria.org. They are open protocols on which anyone can build new things like ActivityHub and Matrix, and alternative operating systems like Devuan or LineageOS. Or even whole parts infrastructure with servers and everything needed to keep it running around it like Disroot.org has built over the years. And while there are no collectives (that I know of) that make hardware, there are many that make software with the aim of being able to use existing hardware longer, like postmarketOS, an operating system for old phones, or Q4OS that still does it on a computer 300Mhz & 256MB RAM. For reference that’s a computer from the days when the internet still said kgggg beep when you accessed it. There is a world open to alternatives. We just need to organise around them.

Welcome to the world of Partly Automated not-so-Luxurious Trans*feminist Earth Anarchism. A future where the machine is taken care of by the collective it belongs to. A machine that helps the collective without harming others. A machine connected to other machines in an equal relationship with consent from both sides. No clients, no servers, no up and no download. A world full of friction, discomfort, poetry and happiness. A world where it still matters what is connected to whom, but where we ourselves make the connections we need and disconnect the ones that no longer matter. And the occasional computer that stops working and refuses to apologise for it.

Curious about more? Put this newspaper aside, turn off your phone and come to the AA Talk at OT301 (Fan cinema on the 2nd floor) on Wednesday 8 March. We will then explore the world of collective digital ownership together in an open conversation between creators, thinkers and builders. Because we all see that the current capitalist internet must be broken.