[Download Link]

Transcript:

I am a Terrorist.
I like to kill.

I have a horn,
two fangs
and a dragonfly tail.

Chased away from my home,
hiding from fear,
saving my life,
doors slammed on my face,

when patience is tested
pushed against the wall,
battered, justice constantly denied,
from that dead end
I have returned.

I am the humiliation
you gulped down
with flattened nose.
I am the shame
you buried in darkness.

I am a terrorist
shoot me down.

Cowardice and fear
I left behind
in the valley
among the meowly cats
and lapping dogs.

I am a bullet
I do not think

from the tin shell
I leap for that thrilling
2-second life
and die with the dead.

I am the life
you left behind.

Music by ManMachineMan

[Download Link]

This statement is part of many abolition statements published by the journal, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics. Read the original post here.

Transcript:

“Notes Against & Beyond Our Carceral Regime: Erica Meiners on Abolition,” a statement published by Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics at abolitionjournal.org

Sex offender registries and community notification laws, like prisons, often mask origins or forms of violence. Yet the persistent response: What will be built to replace prisons? obscures the harm and ineffectiveness of our carceral regime. This question also demands from those who engage in critique a response or a “solution.” If not registries, then what? I can’t count the times I have been asked this question. Even engaging with this “alternatives” question (I am beginning to hate that word) strengthens the dismissal of critique, subsequently erases the harm done by the police and prisons, and masks the ineptitude of, for example, the registry to meaningfully address child sexual violence and our white supremacist heteropatriarchy that defines who even counts as a child or sentient.

I generally offer the both/and response, perhaps contradictory to some. It seems vital to name how our current regime exacerbates and reproduces forms of state or structural violence, and makes many, even those who count as children, profoundly unsafe. I also highlight that critique does not require knowing “the response.” I try, in a range of ways, to think through and practice this form of engagement. It is tricky because people want to feel and to be safe. The affective dimensions of our anti-prison movements are under specified. If not registries, then what? is often tied to bodily engagements, feelings.

And yet. Despite my desire to not respond to this question, I also feel strongly about naming how everyday people continue to imagine and build–sometimes inconceivable, temporal–alternatives. People have, and continue to, address harm without involving the state. Ad hoc and formal groups are building and practicing responses to (child) sexual violence “outside” law enforcement. Is this perfect? No. Do these engagements provide “the solution?” No. Messy, flawed, and partial these engagements create new networks, circuits of relations, lines of accountability, ways of building communities.

Music by Anitek.

[Download Link]

Read the full article at RaceBaitr.

Transcript:

Whiteness must be banished to history—to an other-space of that which is unknown and impossible. There is no way in which whiteness can move that is freeing or liberating for Black people, so there is no way for white people to free or liberate.

Whiteness is indivisible from white people. To identify as white is to claim the social structure of whiteness, is to always wade in the waters of anti-Blackness. Sociologist Anthony Giddens criticizes our general conceptualization of social structure for having “a tendency to view structure and symbols as somehow alien to the actors who produce, reproduce, and transform these structures and symbols.” It is this tendency that so easily clouds our understanding of whiteness and motivates us to embrace white allyship. Black liberation would mean the destruction of whiteness, but whiteness is upheld by all white people. White people cannot escape upholding it.

There is no answer to the question of what white people can do for Black liberation, but racism veils reality so easily and efficiently. It is anti-reality. It makes the impossible seem not only possible, but a worthwhile endeavor. It truly does keep you, as Toni Morrison said, “from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again.”

The dilemma of what white people should do to address racism has the same exhausting function of racism, because this dilemma is racism. Because for white people “to do” anything means that whiteness must be centered in a way that would perpetuate its oppressive essentiality.

This is all to say, importantly, that whiteness cannot be done well, cannot be done without violence or without being in opposition to Blackness and Black freedom. But the extent of this lies far beyond ashy campaigns and disturbing open letters begging other white people to atone for their sins using the blood of Black women. We must critically engage the possibility that whiteness is only violent to Blackness, is only and can only ever be antithetical to Black liberation.

All ways of addressing Black liberation for which white people are praised is always work Black people—Black poor and working class women, trans, non-binary, disabled and queer people especially—have already done and been doing and have made possible for white people to know.

Therefore, white people should move comfortably in neither Black spaces nor white spaces. Even those who are well-meaning should drive themselves into the ground trying to figure out how to occupy a positive whiteness—because it is impossible. Only in this frenzy, when the sense of order that is critical to whiteness turns to chaos in every place, can the motivation to destroy it overcome the compulsion to reform it.

After whiteness is obliterated, at that point, what the people who now identify as white should do is a giant theoretical exercise: what comes after whiteness? How does someone become not white? That is the legitimate and critical work of many.

Music by Damscray

[Download Link]

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook, follow us on Tumblr, rate us on iTunes, and hi five us at the Headquarters of the United Nations.

Contributions from:

• freesound.org and its users cdrk, rastataper, robinhood76, bram, 303creative, f4kf4ce, edhutscheck, and bigfriendlyjiant
• “Tu Chale Sung by Three Children” by Samuel Corwin
• Nightshift by Force of Nature
• Morning Edition Theme Music by BJ Leiderman
• Music from album “Tumbling Dishes Like Old Man’s Wishes” by Jahzzar
• Music from album “The Leave of Leaves” by Thorn1
• “Bury Your Heart” by EZTV
• “The Day That Came To Us” by Nitasha Kaul
• “On Throwing Rocks” by anonymous submission on Conflict MN
• “I Am A Terrorist” by Tenzin Tsundue

[Download Link]

Excerpt from an anonymous submission on Conflict MN.

Transcript:

… But who defines what “violence” is? And who decided that being “peaceful” was not only the best strategy, but the only possible one? In short, the cops did, but the cops conceived as a mechanism. The police are really nothing other than a mechanism for neutralizing threats to the state’s monopoly on violence, a monopoly that includes the authority to define it. Hence the activists’ repeated claims that they can police their neighborhoods. They’re right, and in this sense, the angry man at Sunday’s demonstration was entirely correct. The consequences of this “community policing” became immediately obvious when they physically excluded his body and voice by forming a circle and singing over him.

Let us not forget COINTELPRO’s expressed aims in the 60’s: “Prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups. This is of primary importance.” And what was their fear concerning a so-called “black messiah?” That he “abandon his ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence).” Thus, when protesters, and especially the activists, declare their own righteous peaceful purity, they do so only by excluding the hooded ones near the back who chose to throw  water bottles, stones, bricks, and trash cans at the police macing us. Is it really surprising that,  after the cops clearly retreated while being pelted with stones, the activists still present the self-congratulatory and yet self-victimizing image of the pacifist protester? When activists make calls to “prosecute the police” and to “have black cops in our neighborhoods,” they are merely expressing rage at the most flamboyant aspects of a fluid power dynamic that systematically colonizes abroad and at home. They just want to pretty it up. As a 16 year old yelled at the black cop who came to replace a white cop: “fuck you too, you can go home as well.”

When activists declare that the stone throwing was merely a reaction to the violence of the police and assure the media that it was quickly quelled, they rob the event of it’s plurality and exclude those “who don’t get it,” who “were raised differently,” or who “strongly reacted.” It doesn’t matter what race the person is saying it is, this is colonial logic that de facto excludes any form of resistance that doesn’t appeal to the police, the state, and the media. It implicitly, through its own violent exclusion of the resistance of others, supports the world as it is. It is reactionary. ”In its simplest form this nonviolence signifies to the intellectual and economic elite of the colonized country that the bourgeoisie has the same interests as they.” (Frantz Fanon) And when they declare that this violence will only provoke the police into attacking us (or even imply that those hit with marking bullets brought it upon themselves) this legitimizes the violence of the police, while delegitimizing the violence of the kids throwing bottles. Thus, again, activists show themselves to be doing the work of the police.

Music by Thorn1

[Download Link]

Transcript:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Music by Helios.

The wait is over. The first episode is here! We start off with a bang, one that’s louder than the average drone strike. We bring you two stories from the heart of the Free World, and a report from its central nervous system. Your best news source delivers its best ever.

[Download Link]

Don’t forget to like us on Facebook, follow us on Tumblr, find us on iTunes, and hi five us at the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Consensual / Non-consensual contributions from:
– freesound.org and its users cdrk, jsbarrett, FreqMan, tezzza, Corsica_S, RugerMuller
– Home by Warsan Shire
– The Nobodies by Eduardo Galeano
– Nightshift by Force of Nature
– Nevergreen by Emancipator
– Song Three by Yume Bitsu
– Islamotronic Cantilliation by The Orientalist

[Download Link]

Transcript:

I felt sorry for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination. Missing a meal wasn’t so terrible – it was the ghastly emptiness of the street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like another, and all so empty and cheerless-looking. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and beautifully-hideously-elegant brown-stone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a crust of bread.

That’s what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell “Listen, listen, people, I’m a guy that’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?” If you could only go out in the street and put it to them clear like that. But no, you don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you’re hungry you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That’s something I never understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple – you just say “Yes” when someone comes up to you. And if you can’t say “Yes” you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me.

That’s what I think about, more than about whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s just what the bastards don’t want you to do – to live! They want you to spend your whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That’s reasonable. That’s intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn’t be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn’t have to shit in your pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn’t be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million-billion varieties, maybe there wouldn’t even be glass in the windows, maybe you’d have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn’t be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn’t be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn’t be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn’t be any god-damned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn’t need a visa or a passport or an ID card because you wouldn’t be registered anywhere and you wouldn’t bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn’t make any difference since you wouldn’t own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?

Music by Quantic

But some young minds resist domestication. And some of those minds call themselves hackers.

[Download Link]

Transcript:

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers.  “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…

Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

I am a hacker, enter my world…

Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

Damn underachiever.  They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school.  I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.  I understand it.  “No, Ms.

Smith, I didn’t show my work.  I did it in my head…”

Damn kid.  Probably copied it.  They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up.  Not because it doesn’t like me…

Or feels threatened by me…

Or thinks I’m a smart ass…

Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…

Damn kid.  All he does is play games.  They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found.

“This is it… this is where I belong…”

I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…

Damn kid.  Tying up the phone line again.  They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.  We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.  The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.  We explore… and you call us criminals.  We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.  You may stop this individual, but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

Music by Brett Marshall Lefferts

[Download Link]

Transcript:

1.
A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent,
intimacy rigged with terrors,
a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter’s ink-stick planned,
a scene of desolation comforted
by two human figures recklessly exposed,
leaning together in a sticklike boat
in the foreground. Maybe we look like this,
I don’t know. I’m wondering
whether we even have what we think we have–
lighted windows signifying shelter,
a film of domesticity
over fragile roofs. I know I’m partly somewhere else–
huts strung across a drought-stretched land
not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother
watching my children shrink with hunger.
I live in my Western skin,
my Western vision, torn
and flung to what I can’t control or even fathom.
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.

2.
They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies,
if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius
starves herself to feed others,
self-hatred battening on her body?
Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive
is raging under the name of an “act of god”
in Chad, in Niger, in the Upper Volta–
yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children,
that male State that acts on us and on our children
till our brains are blunted by malnutrition,
yet sharpened by the passion for survival,
our powers expended daily on the struggle
to hand a kind of life on to our children,
to change reality for our lovers
even in a single trembling drop of water.

3.
We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;
even our intimacies are rigged with terror.
Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,
I stand convicted by all my convictions–
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each other, we’re scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
to wield and guide its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses–
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.

4.
The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me. Yes, I’m alive to write these words,
to leaf through Kollwitz’s women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the “mothers” drained of milk, the “survivors” driven
to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision
bitter, concrete, and wordless.
I’m alive to want more than life,
want it for others starving and unborn,
to name the deprivations boring
into my will, my affections, into the brains
of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind.
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.
Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,
a woman shields a dead child from the camera.
The passion to be inscribes her body.
Until we find each other, we are alone.

Music by Yume Bitsu.