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More and more rejection started to creep into my musical expression. Why was I still using ideas I knew from rock or rap or classical music? Could I come up with something of my own, beyond all that—or even entirely separate from it? I began removing the elements I’d been brought up to believe turned sound into music: song structure, key signatures and time signatures, traditional instrumentation and traditional recording processes. Actually, why not jettison notes and rhythms entirely?I was listening to ever more obscure experimental music. Musique concrète. Power electronics. Noise. Harsh washes of static, shrill metallic reverberations and low drones, spliced tape, mutated voices, the clicks and glitches of modified or dying electronic devices. In my own work I experimented with more abrasive tones and abnormal structures. Squelchy soundscapes made with obscure freeware. My untrained playing on a borrowed saxophone, shredded beyond recognition with editing and distortion. Half an hour of echoing pulse waves from a modified video game console, slowed down 800 percent and layered with radio static humming through guitar pedals. My creations became rough, sprawling masses of sound.I went down this path of rejection and abandonment, trying to find what was outside the music I knew, and I discovered a lot. The promise of a new musical language was tantalizing, but it never quite materialized. It started to feel like I was pushing against a wall. I realized that, as much as I enjoyed the thrill of discovery each time I found a new way to manipulate sound, my creations left me unsatisfied.

— Make Your Own Rules by Andrew Huang

Often, creative ideas, attitudes, and working methods seem to be at odds with each other or mutually exclusive. Do you create for yourself or for others, plan or improvise, chase inspiration or let it come to you? Across different seasons of our lives—or even moments of our days—there’s much more room than we usually give ourselves to try something different from what we, or the world, usually expect. Living in this fluidity is a massive advantage when everyone else is trying to categorize and stabilize, valuing solid ground over taking flight.

— Make Your Own Rules by Andrew Huang

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.

— The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

One of the key features of live coding to me is that openness, and I’m not just talking about free software but the intention to collaborate in nonhierarchical and noncompetitive ways. The next step is to dismantle capitalism—see you there <3. (--Lucy Cheesman aka Heavy Lifting)

— Live Coding by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, Alan F. Blackwell, and 2 others

I have, however, experienced a major transformation that I will try to explain. In the last edition I wrote that human sexuality was an enigma or a riddle. Since then this enigma has become endowed with even more significance for me. Scientific progress, while it may bring clear practical benefits, more often than not makes the human condition more rather than less difficult to understand. No doubt there are exceptions, but in my experience they have been few. One particularly telling example, which I will revisit at several points in this book, is brain imaging. We may use brain imaging to study what happens in the brain when we become sexually aroused, or to compare and contrast individuals with normal and low levels of sexual desire. What we find is a multiplicity of interactive brain functions that do not slot easily into our preconceived concepts of ‘sexual arousal’ or ‘sexual desire’. And why should they? The common assumption that we can work out, with our brains, how those brains work, is one aspect of the arrogance of human beings. There are many, beyond the field of brain science, who believe that it is only a matter of time before science gets everything worked out. This has not made me nihilistic about scientific research, far from it; the practical benefits of research continue to be considerable. But it has made me more humble, and in the process has intensified my sense of spirituality.

— Human Sexuality And Its Problems, 3rd ed. by John Bancroft

While live coding aspires to be an inclusive community of practice, it is not always as simple as that. As live coder JA points out, “Computing has been coded masculine.” The gateway of entry might well be open in principle, but this does not always mean that its threshold is easily crossed. Networks and communities emerge through complex webs of association and initiation, friendship, and fraternity.

— Live Coding by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean, Alan F. Blackwell, and 2 others

“What part of yourself did you have to destroy in order to survive in this world?”

I was terrified that when I came into myself, I would lose everything. Instead, I found myself. I found the connection I had been searching for my entire life: people who loved me for me and not my category; beauty in my individuality, not my obedience.

Over time, I learned that where I was taught dissonance, I found harmony. This beard, this skirt, this love: There are no contradictions here, there is just someone trying to figure it out. Someone very similar to and very different from you.

— Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon, Ashley Lukashevsky

The thing about shame is that it eats at you until it fully consumes you. Then you cannot tell the difference between their shame and your own— between a body and an apology. It’s not just that you internalize the shame; rather, it becomes you. You no longer need the people at school telling you not to dress like that; you already do it to yourself. You no longer need your family telling you to be quiet; you already do it to yourself. You edit yourself, and at some point, it becomes so normal that you can’t even tell that you’re doing it. And the worst part is that you no longer have anyone else to blame.

— Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon, Ashley Lukashevsky

How are you supposed to be believed about the harm that you experience when people don’t even believe that you exist? The assumption is that being a masculine man or a feminine woman is normal and that being us is an accessory. Like if you remove our clothing, our makeup, and our pronouns, underneath the surface we are just men and women playing dress up. The scrutiny on our bodies distracts us from what’s really going on here: control. The emphasis on our appearance distracts us from the real focus: power.

— Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon, Ashley Lukashevsky

The problems that blockchain technologies say they will fix are inevitably not the problems that I’m worried about.

For example, there are various proposals for blockchain-based social media, with posts, or identities, or both, hosted on immutable ledgers. I’m skeptical of these overall. These ledgers’ immutability is inextricably bound to a speculative market in some kind of token that incentivizes third parties to either “stake” or “mine” crypto assets. The speculative value of these assets is tied to a volatile and entirely mutable belief that they will continue to appreciate, and if that belief collapses, it takes the tokens with it, and the immutable ledger ceases to be a reliable source of ground truth.

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow

One thing we know for certain about the Big Tech companies is that they lie all the time: they lie about which data they collect from you; they lie to advertisers about whether you saw an ad; they lie to publishers about whether they collected money for an ad. They lie about their taxes, their labor practices and every other commercially significant subject.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the only time they told the truth was when they boasted about how great their products are?

— The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow