News from the Collective

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 30 – Penny as Producer Penny Rimbaud is best known as a founding member of the anarcho-punk collective Crass, as well as for his work as a poet, writer, and philosopher. But beyond these well-known aspects of his life and practice lies another, less frequently discussed dimension: his role as a […]

Los Angeles, June 4, 2025

Dear Geert—

More and more, I see what’s happening in the USA as a war on the young that they don’t even know they are fighting, much less how much they are losing. Much has been made of MAGA edgelords and the “vibeshift” towards conservatism, especially among young men. Perhaps more surprising was the move of young Latino and even Black men into the Trumpist camp, accounted for by both economic woes keeping them from buying the big ass truck of their macho dreams and a misogynoir generated by Kamala Harris, who embodied their worst nightmares of the scolding Human Resources director. Well, this first-person-shooter-playing, gonzo-porn-watching, anabolic-supplement-scarfing, Bitcoin-coveting, under-employed, and mostly white but vaguely multi-racial coalition of the overly on-line will start finding out that being chaos voters brings vastly more chaos down on them than on the older, richer cohort that continues to define the Republican party’s real power center.

Trump has established a new KKK, but this time it’s not about Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but rather the Kings of the KakiKleptoKryptotocracy he’s cementing into place. To break this down, kaki is shit, or rule by the worst, klepto is just pure theft, and krypto is the blockchain-enabled means by which the Trumpian fusion of conservatives, libertarians, nationalists, and flat-out racists are eating the seed corn of America’s future. This is the very future that is being chain sawed with every executive order, fluctuating tariff, and random cruelty that the administration throws at the wall to see if it hurts someone. In the past, only the hardest core Ayn Rand fans saw themselves as Omega men, those talented and righteous ones who’d gotten theirs and didn’t need to give anything back, much less pay forward—hence their antipathy verging on rage against the very idea of taxes. Combine with this with the even more virulent hatred of “the woke mind virus”—a third-rate locution reminiscent of B-movie sci-fi from the 1960s—in order to justify “owning the libs” as the highest goal of contemporary politics, no matter what the damage to the future.

The seed corns I’m talking about are the inheritances that allowed our present tech overlords to ascend to their own Silicon Valhallas: the trillions invested in basic research and the Internet, the rule of law that supports commerce and trade, the funding of cultural resources that can be monetized as content, even the civic and fiscal commitment to a literate and numerate population that can consume their wares.

All these factors and more combined to create the soft power, the Zivilmacht to use the German phrase, that America welded to its military might. Together these were fundamental to securing the preeminence of the American economy. This was the seedbed for the future of those young voters who have swung towards authoritarianism over the last three national US elections since 2016. As a result of their electoral choices, when it comes time for them to tend the fields, they’ll find that the generations that preceded them left the land barren, and the barn empty of anything to regenerate growth. All that these young voters—and the non-voters who were in vague sympathy with the “fun” of watching a television performer entertain them into ruin—get was the satisfaction of watching someone more powerful than them piss all over the people they don’t like.

The “adult entertainment” these dudes fap to owes a lot to a creative disruptor with the nom de porn Max Hardcore (born Paul Little, also known as Paul Steiner, died a convicted felon in 2023). In a memorable 1998 essay titled “Big Red Son,” David Foster Wallace writes about Max as the father of Gonzo porn, a genre that perpetrates “on women levels of violation and degradation that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.” Foster Wallace writes about the man, his milieu, and his entourage in a way that feels eerily appropriate to describe the slippage between Trump the man, Trump the performer, Trump the President, and the sycophants and assorted cabinet members who surround him. “Good old Max Hardcore, for instance, is a total psychopath—that’s part of his on-screen Gonzo persona—but so is the real Max/Paul Steiner. You’d almost have to have been there in that suite. Max sits holding court in his hat and pointy boots, looking at once magisterial and mindless, while his red-suited acolytes laugh on cue and a jr. high dropout shows off her valves.” Max found economically distressed girls with rough family backgrounds and took them fresh off the bus in LA to be dressed as underaged jailbait, sodomized, urinated on, fisted, and “broken” (his word), all in service of the riches, attention, and fame Max craved. He repeated his philosophy (such as one can describe flat out violent misogyny) many times in videos and interviews: “We’re not happy until you’re not happy.”

Whole swaths of MAGA have adopted this Maximal cruelty: they are gleeful about the unhappiness of those around them. The love of liberal tears has become a taste for tears period, no matter if they are shed by political opponents, immigrants, trans athletes, furloughed scientists seeking cancer cures, fired federal park rangers, or anyone else who wanders into the present administration’s crosshairs. Years of faux-tough politicians, trash-talking radio hosts, and legions of Internet trolls have modeled a coarseness that inured the new MAGA demographics to empathy, and in so doing destroyed any civic trust that might be built up, much less solidarity.

That Silicon Valley’s oligarchs went all in for Trump this time round is not interesting in and of itself other than that it reaffirms that great wealth inexorably moves its holders towards authoritarianism, if not outright fascism. It’s also a reminder, as if we needed one, that empathy is not part of the tool set needed to generate a world-dominating fortunes. That young men with precarious economic prospects at best feel drawn to the same flame as the ultra-wealthy may be testament to diminishing returns democracy is getting from education in the 21^st century. Or maybe America’s addiction to get-rich-quick schemes like meme stocks, sports betting, crypto and multi-level marketing has deluded them into thinking they’re just temporarily impoverished alpha male billionaires.

What doesn’t seem to penetrate is that the new vibes and policies the young have swung towards aren’t going to do anything for them except make others in their exact cohort unhappy. Manufacturing won’t come back, what jobs get generated won’t be unionized, the safety net will become an ever more unsafe sieve, and the richest members of society will use their tax cuts to further wall themselves off from the proles via private schools, private clubs, private gates, and private security. There comes a time when even the most committed social theorist has to look at false consciousness and rebrand it as suicidal idiocy. This sort of analysis has been itself critiqued as an unwillingness to “listen to the other side,” but as we enter a post-literate, post-numerate moment best described as an ideology of feels what is there to “listen” to?

This isn’t even a Hobbesian war of all against all, it’s more like Survivor, with the wealthy and connected old as the producers, the ill-prepared young as the contestants, and a final prize that’s a sordid blend of kaki, klepto, and krypto. These young men will find that they are not really competitors at all, but merely NPCs, or non-player characters, in Trump 2.0 and his co-conspirators’ theater of cruelty. As Max Hardcore said of the actress he treated as NPCs, “By the time I’m done with them, they’re already dead inside.”

Hope you’re happy—

Peter

Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book s City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA. His previous letters to Geert can be found here.

.

Voice and sound theorist Zeynep Bulut’s Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025) is a remarkable work that reconfigures the ways we define “voice.” The text is organized into three sections—Part 1: Plastic (Emergence of Voice as Skin), Part 2: Electric (Embodiment of Voice as Skin), and Part 3: Haptic (Mediation of Voice as Skin)—each articulating Bulut’s exploration of the simultaneously personal and collaborative ways voice evolves among various sonic entities and environments. Through analyses of several artistic works that experiment with sound, Bulut successfully highlights the social effects of these pieces and how they alter our expectations of what it means to communicate and be understood.

It’s easy to reduce one’s understanding of voice to the purely spoken, the dialogic, the linguistically communicative, but Bulut’s conception of voice reaches beyond these forms. In her introduction, she states that she represents voice as something that “…evolves, through varied sounds, senses, bodies and technologies. In other words… distributed forms and instances of voice, which underlie the making of a voice, instead of giving a voice to something or someone, or being given a voice” (1). Whereas it may be easy to consider voice as something insular and complete, Bulut argues that it is in fact highly contestable, and shifts based on various environmental/social circumstances—this she aptly labels the “plasticity of voice.” Since Bulut envisions voice as something malleable, this unearths its responsive potentials, and eventually leads us to the image that Bulut will repeatedly return to over the course of the text—”voice as skin.”

Initially, “voice as skin” may seem perplexing, as these two elements appear in direct contrast to each other. However, I believe that the blending of these assumedly divergent facets is what makes Bulut’s work and scholarship so strong. None of her arguments complacently subsiston the known, the expected, and so when she presents voice as skin, it makes sense that she has formed this concept in order to continue extending her readers’ understandings of how we embody and experience sound.

Voice as skin is meant to illuminate the responses and sonic productions that often go unnoticed. It is a dynamic presence that defies static restrictions desperate to make it only one thing. It is “…imagining voice as a multisensory interface, a tactile and haptic affect across bodies of all kinds, without being limited to the human body, to human audition or the labels of verbal language” (234). As you proceed with Bulut’s argument, voice as skin repeatedly arises in different, somewhat surprising iterations throughout the chapters, continuously reframing the ways one may consider the experiential potentials and qualities of sound. “Voice is already a plural phenomenon” (218) Bulut states, “Each one of us carries another’s voice” (218). Everyone is in possession of their own sonic productions, but because we exist within a shared sonic landscape—Bulut regards this through Bruce Odland’s concept of the “sonic commons”—we have to become more sensitive resonant sources for the sounds that are directed at and emerge from this voice as skin.

Bulut makes it clear that there is a consequence to sound. Even when an individual is not engaged in dialogue or aurally responding to some other sonic stimuli, there is a voicing—a reaction, a sensing, a renegotiation of the body within the shifting soundscape—that occurs. Bulut analyzes a myriad of experimental sound artworks throughout Building a Voice, but her analysis of Pauline Oliveros’s Environmental Dialogue is where she really drives home the various ways in which one may “respond” to sound: “You listen to the sound attentively, and may respond to it or not… Regardless of a vocal or instrumental articulation of a pitch, therewould be a mental reinforcement in the process” (68). In later chapters, specifically those in Part 3 that discuss gesture as voice and biosensing musical interfaces, Bulut states that “Bodies constantly talk” (173)—that is, they inherently articulate something that either represents themselves or a reaction to another sonic production.

What Bulut’s readers receive throughout Building a Voice is a work of scholarship that strives against the possibility of sonic apathy. Even while attempting to not respond to a sound or pitch, one still notes—pun intended—the impact of these sonic productions on themselves and the space around them. Not saying anything is still a statement, Bulut reveals. It still “voices.”

Bulut’s diversification of voicing is astounding to read, but what I admire most about Building a Voice is that it underscores the importance of hearing. When Bulut discusses the ways we do or do not listen, I believe her scholarship becomes especially timely. In Part 2, Chapter 6: “Sharing a Skin,” Bulut describes the limits of empathy when it comes to fully hearing another individual: “We hear one another through our own wounds and then only partially” (134). She doesn’t make this claim to invalidate others’ efforts to show empathy. In fact, I think there is significant care contained in this specific argument. Rather than believe one is innately endowed with the skills to hear someone, or assume someone has the ability to fully hear us, Bulut encourages her readers to approach these experiences with humility:

We may be frustrated with the fact that no one truly understands or hears us, or that someone imagines that they understand us when they don’t. There is no full translation or hearing of anything. We can only connect in parts. We can only be a sounding board that both echoes and diffracts (134).

We are living in a time where several historically vulnerable communities face daily antagonization at home and abroad. Simply opening social media will present you with multiple posts pleading for allies to speak out for those facing ridicule, abuse, and even annihilation. For individuals who elect to answer those calls—who feel compelled to take on the profound commitment of assuming a “voice” for these communities—Bulut’s book provides some necessary food for thought. If we cannot fully hear nor understand those we wish to advocate for or protect, how might we renegotiate our current styles of activism away from the idea of “giving voice” (or, for that matter, considering anyone to be “voiceless”)? How might we honor the differences between individuals without viewing this as a move toward disconnection, an acceptance of inaction?

Building a Voice is an exciting text because it presents one with so many beautiful examples of experimental sound art, but I believe it becomes asocially integral work when Bulut indicates why revolutionizing the way we execute our methods of hearing and voicing is so important. By this, she doesn’t just illustrate the ways in which one builds a voice, she also reveals how one builds a kind of sonic and social consciousness. To read Building a Voice is to have one’s understanding of their own and the world’s resonant capabilities irreversibly transformed. This is writing about sound on another frequency—it’s time to tune in.

—

Featured Image: “Plantar Aspect,” by Pekka Nikrus, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

—

Enikő Deptuch Vághy is a poet, artist, and editor. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Additionally, she is the Founding EIC of the literary and arts journal Lover’s Eye Press. 

—

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

SO! Reads: Steph Ceraso’s Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening–Airek Beauchamp

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

Listening to and through “Need”: Sound Studies and Civic Engagement–Christie Zwahlen

“Listening to the Border: ‘”2487″: Giving Voice in Diaspora’ and the Sound Art of Luz María Sánchez”-D. Ines Casillas

By Armin Medosch,

This book is a message in a bottle that washed ashore ten years after it was sent. Armin Medosch began documenting self-managed local networking initiatives with his book Freie Netze published in the German language in 2004. He iteratively developed The Rise of the Network Commons in draft chapters published on his website, The Next Layer, from 2013 until 2015, before his death in 2017.

The Rise of the Network Commons is a cultural history of ‘the exciting world of wireless community network projects’ that spread from its origins in London, Berlin, Vienna, Copenhagen to Spain, Greece, North- and South America, and Africa. While deploying cutting-edge technology, the movement is made up of technical, social, and artistic hackers with a range of backgrounds and skills.

This is the twofold thesis that Armin develops in this book: Involving ordinary people in building a network commons has a profound emancipatory effects on them. At the same time, doing so contributes to the democratization of technology: As a community we can begin to shape future technologies to serve our local needs rather than benefit commercial interests.

As a history of community infrastructure, The Rise of the Network Commons is a highly topical narrative for strengthening the resilience of our local last mile digital infrastructures and re-enforcing regional digital self-sovereignty through direct community participation and knowledge sharing. We build the wireless commons by becoming sovereign neighbors of practice and expertise.

Armin Medosch (1962 – 2017) was an Austrian media artist, journalist, curator, theorist, critic, and a pioneer of internet culture in Europe. As art activist, he co-initiated the transformation of the ship MS Stubnitz, a former GDR deep-sea fishing vessel, into a floating art space. He is well recognized as a journalist and as the co-editor of Telepolis. As an academic he earned a Master of Arts in Interactive Digital Media at the University of Sussex and a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London and continued to his last days to publish, teach and research.

Author: Armin Medosch

Edited by: Volker Ralf Grassmuck and Adam Burns

With special thanks to: Ina Zwerger, Elektra Aichele, Panayotis Antoniadis, Gregers Baur-Petersen, Andreas Bräu, Sebastian Büttrich, Teresa Dillon, André Gaul, Aaron Kaplan, Geert Lovink, Monic Meisel, Mauricio Román Miranda, Jürgen Neumann, Ignacio Nieto Larrain, Julian Priest, Enrique Rivera, Tim Schütz, Felix Stalder, Thomas Thaler, Ulf Treger, Sven (C-ven) Wagner, Simon Worthington, Manuel Orellana Sandoval and everyone at Señal 3, TV Piola.

Cover design: Katja van Stiphout

Book production and design: Ruben Stoffelen

Order a copy HERE

Download PDF

Download EPUB

By Kacper Greń (visuals) and Kuba Szreder (text)

This comic tells the story of the duckrabbit, the spirit animal of postartistic practice.  The coming of the duckrabbits was envisioned already in 1971 by art theoretician Jerzy Ludwiński, when he wrote: ‘Perhaps, even today, we do not deal with art. We might have overlooked the moment when it transformed itself into something else, something which we cannot yet name. It is certain, however, that what we deal with offers greater possibilities.’ The duckrabbit emerged in in the 2010s – a decade overshadowed by looming authoritarianism and multiplying crises – when it became the spirit animal of Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office for Postartistic Services in Warsaw, Poland. Living and working inside and out of museums, art history, objecthood, street protests, and artist studios, the duckrabbits found their habitats in unusual and ambivalent places, resistant to the dominant forces of the mainstream art world and political suppression.

It takes a duckrabbit village to bring a comic to life. The initial impulse came from duckrabbits-in-arms Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Marianka Dobkowska, and Bogna Stafańska, curators of the Postartistic Congress. The first edition was commissioned by commissioned by the Insitu Foundation. The narrative draws from years of making and thinking together with the Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office of Postartistic Services (co-run with the Bęz Zmiana Foundation in Warsaw). The initial version of this comic was drafted by Kacper Greń during the seminar ‘Art Beyond Art’ led by Kuba Szreder at the Department for Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The final print edition is published as an INC Zine by the Institute of Network Cultures, coordinated by Sepp Eckenhaussen.

Visuals: Kacper Greń
Text: Kuba Szreder
Coordination & production: Sepp Eckenhaussen
Print: GPS Group, Slovenia

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2025
ISBN: 978-90-82520-91-9

Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

This publication is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Order a free copy of Duckrabbits Unveiled here: https://networkcultures.org/publications/order-inc-publications
Or download the PDF here: http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/duckrabbits_ONLINE.pdf

By Kacper Greń (visuals) and Kuba Szreder (text)

This comic tells the story of the duckrabbit, the spirit animal of postartistic practice.  The coming of the duckrabbits was envisioned already in 1971 by art theoretician Jerzy Ludwiński, when he wrote: ‘Perhaps, even today, we do not deal with art. We might have overlooked the moment when it transformed itself into something else, something which we cannot yet name. It is certain, however, that what we deal with offers greater possibilities.’ The duckrabbit emerged in in the 2010s – a decade overshadowed by looming authoritarianism and multiplying crises – when it became the spirit animal of Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office for Postartistic Services in Warsaw, Poland. Living and working inside and out of museums, art history, objecthood, street protests, and artist studios, the duckrabbits found their habitats in unusual and ambivalent places, resistant to the dominant forces of the mainstream art world and political suppression.

It takes a duckrabbit village to bring a comic to life. The initial impulse came from duckrabbits-in-arms Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Marianka Dobkowska, and Bogna Stafańska, curators of the Postartistic Congress. The first edition was commissioned by commissioned by the Insitu Foundation. The narrative draws from years of making and thinking together with the Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office of Postartistic Services (co-run with the Bęz Zmiana Foundation in Warsaw). The initial version of this comic was drafted by Kacper Greń during the seminar ‘Art Beyond Art’ led by Kuba Szreder at the Department for Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The final print edition is published as an INC Zine by the Institute of Network Cultures, coordinated by Sepp Eckenhaussen.

Visuals: Kacper Greń
Text: Kuba Szreder
Coordination & production: Sepp Eckenhaussen
Print: GPS Group, Slovenia

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2025
ISBN: 978-90-82520-91-9

Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

This publication is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Order a free copy of Duckrabbits Unveiled here: https://networkcultures.org/publications/order-inc-publications
Or download the PDF here: http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/duckrabbits_ONLINE.pdf

By Kacper Greń (visuals) and Kuba Szreder (text)

This comic tells the story of the duckrabbit, the spirit animal of postartistic practice.  The coming of the duckrabbits was envisioned already in 1971 by art theoretician Jerzy Ludwiński, when he wrote: ‘Perhaps, even today, we do not deal with art. We might have overlooked the moment when it transformed itself into something else, something which we cannot yet name. It is certain, however, that what we deal with offers greater possibilities.’ The duckrabbit emerged in in the 2010s – a decade overshadowed by looming authoritarianism and multiplying crises – when it became the spirit animal of Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office for Postartistic Services in Warsaw, Poland. Living and working inside and out of museums, art history, objecthood, street protests, and artist studios, the duckrabbits found their habitats in unusual and ambivalent places, resistant to the dominant forces of the mainstream art world and political suppression.

It takes a duckrabbit village to bring a comic to life. The initial impulse came from duckrabbits-in-arms Sebastian Cichocki, Kuba Depczyński, Marianka Dobkowska, and Bogna Stafańska, curators of the Postartistic Congress. The first edition was commissioned by commissioned by the Insitu Foundation. The narrative draws from years of making and thinking together with the Consortium for Postartistic Practices and the Office of Postartistic Services (co-run with the Bęz Zmiana Foundation in Warsaw). The initial version of this comic was drafted by Kacper Greń during the seminar ‘Art Beyond Art’ led by Kuba Szreder at the Department for Artistic Research and Curatorial Studies, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. The final print edition is published as an INC Zine by the Institute of Network Cultures, coordinated by Sepp Eckenhaussen.

Visuals: Kacper Greń
Text: Kuba Szreder
Coordination & production: Sepp Eckenhaussen
Print: GPS Group, Slovenia

Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2025
ISBN: 978-90-82520-91-9

Email: info@networkcultures.org
Web: www.networkcultures.org

This publication is licenced under Creative Commons Attribution NonCommerical ShareAlike 4.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Order a free copy of Duckrabbits Unveiled here: https://networkcultures.org/publications/order-inc-publications
Or download the PDF here: http://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/duckrabbits_ONLINE.pdf

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 29 Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues   This episode is a discussion with Paul Buhle, Abigail Susik, and Penelope Rosemont about the newly released book Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture. This collection brings together legendary Chicago surrealist Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture over […]