They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine on new technology
And now I understand the problems you can see
– Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles

The silence that inhabits the space between the sounds is blatant and haunting if one stops and listens. This is how we survive.

Previously and no longer, yet still informed by, a disquisition on oppositional listening as a disruptive civic practice in produced space (i.e., impermanence as a tool for imagining alternative futures). Listening in fenced spaces of manufactured scarcity introduces immaterial resistance, ambiguity, and absurdity, complicating capitalist means of space production and identity construction. Clarify—not watching corporate videos in a fast casual lunch spot with no headphones and the volume loud…

Digital logic is finite. Equanimity exists in the absence of power. Sound ephemerality is a tool for deconstructing physical systems and/or ethics within virtual and physical spaces by demapping, jeopardizing its branded logic. In this listening, it is always the present. We are silent and do not participate in the production-consumption feedback loop. When we name and speak that name, we proclaim ownership, such as the first man in the garden shouting taxonomies, a greater sin than eating the fruit. This naming was an assertion of ego and a claim on permanence—the sound of now. Peace in ritual bluster far off skronk hustle loop.

Art is impotent as a moral imperative but may be brutal as a political operation. One must always observe and react. Culture marches like a parade on the road constructed by empire. Anything short of refusal becomes a complicit perpetuation of the system. The price of everything and the value of nothing. Facilitate active listening by graciously and urgently bringing people into self-reflexivity to analyze their own power and how that power either will exploit or can restore others.