Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Live blogging the of mini con

Interactive music recordings (ala rjdj)  from Keith Hennigan.

1. write some music. The quality of music is the most important parameter for a successful piece

2. Figure out the interaction. What and how you record will be driven by the interaction.

Videogame music is interactive or adaptive or generative. Interactive music has intention on the user’s part. Adaptive music responds to user action aimed at changing noon musical parameters. Generative music changes on its own initiative. This is all dynamic music.

Adaptive recordings could react to GPS, time of day, etc.

Music could change structurally, so the order ABACD could become ACBDA etc.

Or it could play the second always in the same order, but with different stems for alternate lyrics, etc.

3. Programming

The platform you use must be distributable to users. Pd runs on everything.

You are likely to be working with stems, because artists often want to control audio quality. readsf~

Or you may wish to work with samples in order to pitch shift, etc.

Or take full advantage of the system and do your own synthesis. The more pd you use, the greater potential for real time control and interaction.

4. Create an interface
Must be usable by non programmers. You can use 3rd party programme like Unity to create nifty interfaces. This can make apps.

questions

Q. Why do this?

A. We have the technology for the first time. Dynamic sound are like chose your own adventure music. Consumers want this. They don’t want to always be passive.

Q. Classical music is goal oriented. Will the big challenge be coming up with modular pieces of music?

A. Yes, this majorly increases the composers workload. He recommends people try to give this a go.

Q. Are the transitions what make this music exciting? They are a liminal space.

A. Queue to queue transitions are the most difficult to get right. Some game composed have a transition matrix of elements to use at transitional points. Change instrumentation. Add a stinger, etc

Q. What makes music good aside from cultural capital?

A. There can be technical issues within an app, such as unintentional glitches. Music can fail on its own terms. Novelty is not enough.

Q. Does using unity make music expensive to publish?

A. They work with indie devs a lot. Whether this is favourable to paying fees per piece? Maybe find a free kit or work with a designer.

Q. Does this change the definition of authorship of a piece of a music?

A. Is a piece always sound like a single piece then it’s a piece. If it changes unrecognisably, you’ve built an instrument. The intention of the creator also counts.

Trying to become slightly better

Last time, I talked a bit about authoritarians, people who sound entirely unlikeable with their bigotry and small mindedness. Here’s the thing, though: a feature of this personality type is a lack of self-awareness. Nobody thinks that they themselves are authoritarian. Indeed, it’s not a binary trait, but a scale, so we’ve all got lots of these traits.

We all think we’re good and moral but the Milgram experiments showed that most people will obey a guy in a lab coat to the point of electric shocking somebody to death. Any one of us could be in that obedient majority. We think we’re against racism, but so do people with a high degree of authoritarianism. We are all against what we recognise as racism, but dog whistles that we haven’t decoded seem like common sense. In short, part of the process of fighting systemic racism includes learning to recognise it and learning to become less authoritarian.

A lot of white people in the US have zero non-white friends. Indeed, people also tend to be limited by gender, class and age. And yet, to become better people we need to be able to interact with and listen to people who are different from us. We also need to practice not taking up too much space and not speaking over people.

This kind of de-centring does not come automatically. It takes practice and in the mean time, there is a risk of being annoying and/or counter-productive. White folks tend to want to re-explain things that a non-white person has already said (something I’m doing right here) or to explain the ‘white perspective’ to people, often in great detail. Or sometimes white people take up a lot of emotional space, in which we get upset by racism or our own guilt or whatever and want to be comforted. It’s hard not to do these things – we’ve been trained to act this way from our extreme youth. I often find it very challenging to avoid taking up too much space in a discussion.

However, it’s possible to practice listening and learning online. If you’re on twitter, follow @deray, @RE_invent_ED and @Nettaaaaaaaa. I feel like reading these feeds provides an incredible opportunity to learn. I’d suggest resisting the urge to reply, argue, or take up space. And rather than rephrase something good, retweet it – amplify their voice rather than taking over.

You can’t fight racism until you learn to recognise it, and this is one way to learn to do that. It is one tiny step on a long journey to a better world.

Authoritarians

If we’re going to talk to racists, it would be helpful to know about more about some of them. I think it’s important to start this post with the assertion that every Anglophone society is structurally racist. We’ve all been indoctrinated with racism from a very young age. There is no way to get through that without absorbing some racist thoughts and ideas. I’m going to say some things that will sound very us vs them, but this is only for convenience sake. The traits I’m going to describe are not binary, but are on a scale. Everyone posses many of these traits in greater or lesser degrees. This is not a look at how good people can reach bad people, but rather how people who are participating in a bad situation can help each other withdraw support from it.

A researcher named Bob Altemeyer has dedicated his career studying how/why people participate in authoritarian systems. He has written a free e-book about this. I re-read it last night to see if it could offer insight into reaching pro-police racists.

Authoritarianism is a set of personality traits that correlates very strongly with racism and being pro-police state. This is also a dangerous type of racist. If they are on juries, etc, they have strong double standards and are more likely to convict people from vulnerable groups and give harsher sentences. They love cops and law and order. And they reliably vote. Furthermore, they have a tendency to bully people different from them, especially if they feel they have the upper hand. They dig victim blaming. This is the kind of person who says that murdered black people shouldn’t have resisted arrest.

Altemeyer confirms things we already knew about these people – namely you can’t argue with them. (p 93) (p 237) Authoritarians are self-righteous, but also full of fear. They have many self-contradictory beliefs, yet feel they have a monopoly on the truth. This is, essentially, an intellectually precarious position and thus I would expect they’d be very prone to white fragility. Also, although they think all kinds of racist things, they’re also aware that overt racism is bad. (p 100) Again, there is no way to win an argument – they come out of defeat feeling more dogmatic and sure of themselves then they did beforehand. (p 93)

However, there is hope. As might be expected of people with no coherent inner life, they are highly dependent on group consensus to shape their views. (p 89) Indeed, they tend to have very little interaction with people who disagree with them, and use this as a way to maintain their beliefs. (p 88) Unfriending them on facebook, therefore, just makes the problem worse. Posting alternative viewpoints at least breaks up the racist consensus in which they’ve surrounded themselves.

Authoritarian followers really want to be normal. They will moderate their bigotry heavily, if it makes them fit in with the norm. (p 35) Therefore, a good way to engage with them is bandwagon technique. If you can pass along polls that show most people thinking the police are overly aggressive or racist, they will moderate their beliefs to conform with the majority. This is how the US went so quickly from gay people being a political wedge issue to gay marriage having majority support. It also really really helps if the authoritarian actually knows someone who is an alien other, but even exposure to any nice people outside of their belief system can help.

Authoritarianism is also really driven by fear. Everyone who is afraid tends to become more authoritarian. This is also what causes people to lash out in general and drives victim blaming. (If victims had it coming, then I’m safe because I’m good.) Reducing fear is a good way to help people chill out and think more rationally. Alas, I don’t have ideas of how to do this, aside from banishing all Fox News from a person’s life, which is easier said than done.

Finally, obviously, authoritarians are not going to come to your White People Getting Over Racism Event, no matter how many cookies are served there. Other connections must be leveraged to make contact. But you’re not just stuck with people who are already frustrating you on social media. Authoritarians are found in large numbers in fundamentalist / evangelical religious groups. If you are also a Christian, you may be able to reach them through pan-Christian initiatives. Again, exposure to people different than themselves helps them become more comfortable with all kinds of others. Also, authoritarians are not necessarily on the wrong side of every issue. Many have concern about the environment – even if there is disagreement on global warming, they are somewhat more likely than most to sign for local community efforts to do things like clean up streams. If you start showing up to help pick up litter, you’re likely to have an opportunity to befriend people with high authoritarian tendencies and expose them to non-authoritarian ideas. Because you will have bonded by working together for a common cause, you’ll be more receptive to each other’s ideas.

In summary, facebook arguments are not going to help with intractable proto-facists, but will just frustrate you and make them feel more sure of themselves. Instead, the way to reach them is by showing their consensus is not universal, exposing them to alternative viewpoints, and working with them on a common cause unrelated to fighting bigotry.

All of this is a lot easier said than done, but at least gives an idea of where to start with some kinds of social contacts.

If you have a racist friend

In 1984, The Special A.K.A. / The Specials sang, ‘If you have a racist friend/ Now is the time, now is the time/ For your friendship to end.’ It’s a catchy song and it takes no prisoners. Racist comments are intolerable, no matter the source ‘Be it your sister /Be it your brother / Be it your cousin or your, uncle or your lover.’ Don’t pretend that racism is socially acceptable. Don’t tolerate it and cut people off if they keep it up, the song directed.

With the invention of social networking, the song suddenly gained new currency. Whereas in the past friends, co-workers and family members engaged in self-censorship around their pinko-liberal connections, Facebook encouraged them to share their inner-most bigotry. And here were The Specials with a proposed solution to how to react to this: unfriend them. Write a note saying why (or don’t) and walk away. Their racism is not socially acceptable and the consequence of sharing it is losing our own wonderful company. It was the moral thing to do! And also very very easy.

But in recent months, the extent of white supremacy in the US has become so glaringly apparent, the easy way out no longer seems good enough. If all left/liberal white people unfriend all of our pro-police contacts on social networking, that does precisely nothing to help anything or anyone but ourselves. If we want to do something about white supremacy, we need to leverage our connections to racist expressions, not sever them.

This will be really hard. I’ve had long, frustrating conversations with religious evangelicals intent on saving me from hell. They barely concealed their intense distaste for deigning to speak to me, pretended their hatred was concern and went through their tiresome, hateful scripts. Somehow, my soul was not saved. I thought maybe we could learn a bit of perspective from each other, but they had no interest in listening to me. They wanted me to accept their truth, surrender my entire identity and conform to their vision of a better world (without me in it). This was not compelling. The person I was speaking to was not my friend. He did not value me as a person. He thought I had nothing interesting or worthwhile about me. I was a soul to save. A target to achieve and then he could move on to the next person to save. We can’t copy this technique and expect it to work.

If we’re going to change the minds of racist friends, we have to actually be friends to them, listen to them, see the good in them, but somehow, through this, never agree to disagree about racism. I don’t know how to do this or how to strike this balance. And, honestly, part of the hard work is that it’s not just reaching one’s friends, but also a commitment to doing a lot of learning and research. What’s more, as white people who benefit from white supremacy, some of it is going to be personally uncomfortable.

And through this all, we still need to de-centre ourselves. The effect on us, as white people, is so far beside the point. Fighting racism is literally a life and death struggle for many Americans.

I lost three days of my life when I tried reasoning with trolls on Twitter, and I got nowhere. I don’t know how to do this right. But I think it needs to be done. Internet searches have not been particularly fruitful on this but here are A few approaches to try and some reasons why these conversations don’t tend to go well.

Have you had success reaching out to a racist friend? How did you do it?

Comment Policy

Everybody is welcome to comment (see below) and hopefully all old comments have been moved over. By default, your first comment is held in moderation and subsequent ones are automatically approved. Alas, it may take me a few days to notice your comment and approve it. This is because I’m lazy and I’m the only admin here. It is not because I don’t love you and your comment. Please be patient.

Once in a very great while, I ask people not to comment unless they have particular lived experiences. This will be noted in the post. Otherwise, if you see a comment box, you’re welcome to type in it.

New Blog Location

A decade or so ago, when my blog hosting company was purchased by Google, I don’t recall being alarmed. They assured me that they wouldn’t be evil. Alas, for the good old days!

As Google has shed their concern about avoiding evil, I’ve been pondering moving away from them. There were two factors that finally pushed me to go.  One was the lack of control over the platform, which interferes with making posts about whatever hack pact I flirt with completing. I couldn’t post my javascript stuff at all. I couldn’t use my favourite music font. The final annoyance was that I couldn’t post my new PD patches with WebPD. Unfortunately, it turns out they don’t actually run with WebPD, but anyway…

The other day, I clicked a link to find out the origin of the slang term ‘on fleek’, which took me to those well known connoisseurs of youth culture, the New York Times. I can’t tell you if their article was good or bad, as I was unable to read it. They greyed out all of their text, pending my filling out a short survey that wanted my medical history. If I had disclosed to Google surverys whether or not I have high blood pressure or diabetes, I might be able to awkwardly use slang like a 39 year old who read about the term in the NYT. Instead, I tried clicking the opt-out link, which failed to work. And that was the moment that pushed me over the edge.

I’m not exactly happy about how google analytics tracks me around the web (which they do, to me and you – with the help of website owners, they know almost everything we click on). But trying to coerce me to disclose private medical history is a step too far. My medical records are private, protected sensitive data in both the US and the EU. They have no right to know and no right to ask. If I had disclosed, they would certainly share that information with advertisers and other interested parties, something that medical privacy laws were expressly written to prevent.  Screw that.

So my new plan is to stop handing all of my data to Google. Step one, the easiest step, is to move my blog. WordPress is extremely easy to use. This is my domain and my server and I can use whatever fonts I want!

The next step is dropping Gmail. Unlike most other email providers, Google does not just deliver your email, but they also hand over keywords to advertisers. Have you ever wondered how it is that you exchange some emails about maybe buying an inflatible raft (or whatever) and then suddenly see a bunch of banner ads about rafts for sale? That’s because Google read your email. Indeed, so many people have gmail accounts, that google is likely to be reading your email even if you don’t use them.

The widespread gmail usage also creates additional issues for users. Many people are confused about their email address and keeping giving out mine when signing up for stuff.  When I briefly signed up for whatsapp, somebody already had an account with my email address.  A lot of app developers seem to have given up even providing a mechanism to get them to stop spamming you with somebody else’s email notifications.  And, indeed, as a related issue, if some other person mistypes or misspells my address when trying to contact me, the typo is likely to actually be an account name for somebody. My would-be correspondent doesn’t get a bounce message or a reply from a user who is used to seeing things not meant for them. Which is why a publisher texted recently me to find out if I was dropping out of their project, as they’d never heard any replies.

And then, finally, I need to de-google my Android phone. My gmail account does not just have all my email, it has my contacts. I helpfully type in the first name, last name, phone number and address of people I want to keep track of. So if you sign up for some_cool_dude@gmail and think that they might read your email and know you have high cholesterol, but at least they don’t know who you are in real life, well, one of your friends with a Samsung just told them you’re John Smith of 124 Some Street, etc and gave them your phone number.

I used to work on web search many years ago and remember when google was a shiny new company. Even when it was small, a lot of employees there were ‘ex’ NSA spooks. Google was happy to hire them. NSA programmers are really good at search algorithms. Google’s journey from being a really good search engine to a gateway that won’t let you pass without demanding access to extremely sensitive medical data has been very gradual. It was easy to trade a bit of privacy for a lot of convenience, but this, finally, is a step too far.

So welcome to my new blog! Theoretically, all my old posts have been moved over. If you still use an RSS reader, update your feed to: http://www.celesteh.com/blog/feed/

Faux- French Food: Quorn Bourguignon

Ingredients

  • olive oil
  • small knob of butter
  • 1 medium onion
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 2 medium-large carrots
  • flour
  • 3 portabella mushrooms
  • 3 shallots
  • 1 bag of qourn fake chicken pieces
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tsp herbes de provence (if they don’t include lavender, add some)
  • 2 tsp thyme
  • 2 tsp bullion powder
  • 1 tsp marmite (or less – to taste)
  • 0.5 bottle french red wine – if you’re outside of france, get the cheapest you can. If you’re inside france, get something you might consider drinking
  • ground pepper

Equipment

  • knife
  • cutting board
  • pan
  • measuring spoon
  • stirring spoon

Instructions

Chop up the onion and cook it over low heat with butter and some olive oil. After the onion goes translucent, add chopped garlic. After the garlic has cooked a bit, add the chopped carrots. After they seems to be somewhat cooked, add a light flour coating and the chopped shallots. After the shallots are a bit cooked, add the chopped mushrooms, hebred de provence and thyme. When the shallots are looking a bit cooked, add the mushrooms. Then, when they seem to have soaked up the oil, add an extra Tbsp of olive oil and wine so it’s an inch or two deep in the pan. Add in the bay leaf, bullion and marmite. Simmer over low heat, topping up with wine when it gets low. When the carrots are soft, add the quorn and cook for 20-25 more minutes.
Keep adding wine, such that there should be a bit of liquid left around at the end of cooking. You should be stirring intermittently throughout. All cooking should be done without a lid on the pan.
This is all based loosely on Delia’s recipe.

Publishing Live Notation

My piece Immrama is a live notation piece. A python script generates image files, as the performance is happening, which are put on a web page. Performers connect via any wifi device with a web browser to see the notation. It uses really simple technologies, so nearly any device should work. A Newton won’t (I made enquires) but an old Blackberry will.
Setting it up requires python and a web server and a lot of faff. It could be packaged into a mac app, but I’m working on linux and it seems like more and more people in the arts are turning to windows, as Apple increasingly ignores their former core audience of artists and designers. It runs fine on my laptop, of course, but I don’t want to have to provide that to anybody who wants to do the piece. Nor do I want to force ensembles to have IT people on hand. Fortunately, I think I’ve stumbled on how to package this for the masses.
I’m working right now to get it all running on a Raspberry Pi. This is a tiny, cheap computer. Instead of having a hard drive, it uses SD cards. This means that I can set everything up to run my piece, put it all on an SD card, and then anybody can put that SD card into their Raspberry Pi and the piece will be ready to go! …In principle, at least.
This piece needs wifi, which does not come with the Pi. Pi owners who want wireless networking get their wifi dongles separately. I got mine off a friend who didn’t need it any more. And while setting up the networking bit, I found at least three different sets of instructions depending on what dongle people have. I could try to detect what dongle they have and then auto-install needed software to match, but, yikes, there are many things I would rather do with my life. I think instead, if you order an SD card, by default, it should come with a dongle – the buyer can opt out, but not without understanding they may need to install different libraries and do some reconfiguring.
Or, I dunno, if you want to run the piece and don’t want to buy a dongle, send me yours and I’ll get it working and send it back with an SD card?
My last software job was doing something called being a release engineer – I took people’s stuff that worked on their own machine and packaged it so the rest of the world could use it. I wanted to be a developer, but that was the job I could get. It seems like I’m still release engineering, even as a composer.
Anyway, this is all very techy, but the point here is to prevent end users from having to do all this. When I’m done, I’ll make an image of the card and use that to make new cards, which I can post to people, saving them my woe. Or, even better, some publishing company will send them to people, so I don’t need to do my own order fulfilment, because queuing at the post office, keeping cards and dongles on hand, etc gets very much like running a small business, which is not actually the point.

Tech Notes so far

Later, I’m going to forget how I got this working, so this is what I did:

  1. Get Raspian wheezy, put it on a card.
  2. Boot the Pi off the card
    1. Put the card in the Pi
    2. Plug in the HDMI cable to the monitor and the Pi
    3. Connect the Pi to a powered USB hub
    4. Put the dongle on the powered hub.
    5. Plug in a mouse and keyboard
    6. Connect your Piu to the internet via an ethernet cable
    7. Turn on the HDMI monitor and the hub
    8. Plug in the Pi’s power cable (and send electricity to the Pi). Make sure you do this last.
  3. On the setup screen, set it to boot to the desktop and set the locale. then reboot
  4. Open a terminal and run:

    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install aptitude
    sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
    sudo apt-get autoremove
    sudo apt-get clean
    sudo aptitude install rfkill hostapd hostap-utils iw dnsmasq lighttpd

  5. Using your regular computer (not the Pi), Find the wifi channel with the least traffic and least overlap

    sudo iwlist wlan0 scan | grep Frequency | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

  6. Try to find out what dongle I have
    1. run: iw list
    2. That returns ‘nl80211 not found’
    3. run: lsusb
    4. That says I have a RTL8188CUS 802.11n adaptor
  7. Use this script for a rtl8188CUS dongle
    1. For future, it would be nice to get the location from the system locale
    2. Autoset the SSID to he name of the piece
    3. Autoset a default password
    4. Indeed, remove all interactivity from the script
  8. Reboot

It might not seem like much, but that was all day yesterday. The first step alone took bloody ages.

To Do

  • Install needed fonts, etc.
  • Try to ensure that the internet remains available over ethernet, but if this isn’t possible, You can still chekc out a github repo to a USB stick and move data that way…
  • Find out what wifi dongle would be best for this application – ideally it has a low power draw, decent range, cheap and commonly owned among people with Pis
  • Set it to hijack all web traffic and serve pages but not with apache! Use the highttpd installed earlier

Best Nutloaf

  • 1 Onion
  • 1 tsp vegetable oil
  • 2-3 slices / 100g stale bread OR 100g matzoh
  • 225 g nuts
  • 300 ml vegetable stock
  • 2 tsp marmite
  • 1 tsp herbs de Provence (or mixed herbs)
  1. Preheat oven to 180 C / 350 F / Gas mark 4
  2. Peel and dice the onion. Cook it in a pan on the stove with the oil
  3. Toast bread until slightly crispy. Process or mill it (or the matzoh, if you’re using that). Grind the nuts
  4. Heat the stock with the marmite. Bring to a boil and then remove from heat.
  5. Mix everything in a mixing bowl and transfer to a greased deep baking tray. Bake for 30 minutes or until dry on top, but not burnt. (You can cover it with foil for the first 20 minutes if you are prone to burning things.)

From Another Dinner is Possible, which is the best vegan cookbook I know of. You should get a copy.
Americans: 300 ml = 1.25 Cups. Apparently, according to this, if you use almonds, you’ll want 1.125 Cups. However, I think you might just need to get a scale for this one, which is a good investment anyway. They’re very useful for beer brewing.

Meet the new phase of Capitalism

It’s a lot like old phases of Capitalism (like, pre-1930), but with more technology. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the US has decided to become an oligarchy coupled with a security state apparatus necessary to maintain extreme inequality. This is not new news, but the rapid emergency of the technology and systems needed to maintain this state of affairs does seem new to people living under it, especially to people who were previously part of privileged classes.
An article in The Nation is looking at bits and pieces of what is emerging. This is, in effect, the neoliberal state. When everything is privatised, everything is organised towards the benefit of the people who own the private systems. Since the private sector is taking over state functions – big functions – the emerging privatisation is big companies. Which means that the owning class is the really very very rich. And the functions they want to take over are sometimes surprising, unless this is viewed as a bid for total political and cultural control. Take, for example, Starbucks.
A few days ago, Starbucks decided that it was time for (white) people in America to have a large conversation about race. Ok, obviously, white people in America really do need to talk about race. We need to listen to things black people are saying, talk amongst ourselves, and work to dismantle white supremacy. Starbucks is not wrong about needing a conversation. What is perplexing is why a chain of coffee shops would take this task on board.
One might be tempted to explain this historically. Coffee shops used to be places where people did gather to talk about politics, especially a few centuries ago. More recently, Starbucks has been forced into culture wars, specifically, the gun debate as they finally decided people carrying large assault rifles were not welcome to terrify their staff. The brand itself has a political resonance, on the side of Apple computers, gay rights, urban ‘creative classes’ and 1990’s Bill Clinton. All of that is specifically proto-neoliberal baggage. And this is a neoliberal project. Let’s look at how it was promoted to baristas on twitter:

(The images on the tweet are from a screen shot of this page. Note the tweet does not contain a link to the post and thus is completely inaccessible to people who rely on screen readers. Seriously, people, if your post is worth sharing, it’s worth making it accessible to blind people.)
The promotional text starts it’s second paragraph with, ‘Change won’t come from the government. It has to come from everyday people like us.’ This fits in very well with the disenfranchisement described in the article in the Nation. Despite being a democracy, this asserts that we cannot depend on the government to have anything to do with our needs or desires. The government does not serve ‘everyday people’. Therefore, the business of social change cannot come from the sort of action one normally undertakes to change government. Not from voting, certainly, but not from marches either. The days of MLK giving speeches in Washington are over, because this not Washington DC’s problem. It’s Seattle, Washington’s problem. To emphasis this, the coupled picture shows a hashtagged coffee cup in front of the Washington Monument, where MLK’s speech happened. Starbucks wants to privatise social movements.
They’ve already made efforts to insert themselves into culture, above and beyond serving coffee. They have previously sold CDs in their shops and want to shape, control and profit from culture more generally. And also this is also a way of wading into a disagreement among billionaires as to what extent white supremacy continues to have utility. On the one hand, voter suppression laws are quite openly removing the right to vote from black people. On the other hand, racial unrest is disturbing the market. Under a deligitmised government, this is how democracy is meant to take place: by people with money coming into a private forum to have a conversation about what number of rights to extend to others. (Starbucks does not tend to build coffee shops in black areas and the imagery they’ve chose to promote this effort is specifically designed to make white people feel comfortable (‘the only race is human’), so this is very much a conversation about others, which is not surprising in a conversation that seeks only to decide on the acceptable amount of white supremacy, but I digress.)
It’s extremely obvious why an oligarchy would want to control the means to the conversation about race. People in the street are alarming. People purchasing things is good. Which is exactly why any effort like this is ultimately disempowering for everyone involved, aside from the owners. The emerging security state is distressing, but it is not insurmountable. It is still possible to resist. Not by heading to our local multinational outlet to demand extra emotional labour from the staff, but by being in the streets. They want people to politely consume and that is what absolutely will not destabilise concentrated power. People do still have power in the US, from mass movements and street protests. Privatisation has zero long term plans about anything, certainly not about managing us. We can still make a better world.