CATS+CIAL Experiment: Reclaiming the Village Clown
This is an artist page by Salome MC. Salome MC was a resident during the CATS+ Spring 2025 cohort.
Overview
For our CATS+ Spring showcase, I created a static webpage esigned to resemble the discovery tab of an image-based social media app, featuring videos ranging from a few seconds to eight minutes long. Stylized as a video-based social media grid, each piece contains CATS+ inside jokes and site-specific references formatted as early internet’s non-political, harmless “fake news”. For a general audience, the page would likely seem confusing, if not entirely meaningless, while the MoHA community - such as those attending the showcase - might find it slightly more engaging. But the true audience for Cats+cial is the handful of CATS+ Spring 2025 insiders, whose interpersonal relationships and shared experiences allow them to appreciate the layers of the work.
I arrived at Cats+cial after a roller coaster of shifting directions during the course of the residency. It’s an attempt to explore if a piece of online media, created as a reprieve from life’s serious aspects- typically categorized as "escapist entertainment," could achieve a deeper purpose in the current climate of the internet with its increasingly hollow and transactional nature. Can there be a meaning, fulfillment, and depth to be gained – for both the creator and the audience beyond the facade, and if yes, how much of it is due to the audience as a “small village” with shared history and purpose, as a opposed to digitally abstracted entities only reachable via non-human calculations?
Due to not being able to attend the showcase, I was unable to get a verifiable answer to the question. But this project was more of a personal reckoning than a scientific experiment anyway. The process to get to Cats+cial helped me to foster a shared culture and sense of belonging with the other residents, which is what I wanted - and needed - ultimately as an artist, a community member, and a human in order to feel ready and secure for the radical next steps.
Backstory, or the Renouncing of the Village Clown
There’s a 2002 interview of Chuck-D (of Public Enemy) by Hiphop journalist Davey D that I love and every few years I go back and re-read. I love the interview not only because of the style and content of the interview, which Davey D excels at, but to immerse myself in D’s cutting-edge-for-early-internet website’s look, unique to that brief time in history. A time when the font Comic Sans did not have any baggage other than being associated with the comic books, and the online world felt more authentic than the real one.
That short, authentic window of interwebs also happens to coincide with the peak of American conscious rap. PE’s 2002 album Revolverlution, topic of the above interview, was followed by New Whirl Odor just a few years later in 2005, both cherished albums for international fans of conscious hip-hop. Indeed, between 2000 to 2010, not only Americans but also the world were blessed by many legendary underground and mainstream rap albums not afraid to be “woke” in the real sense of the world. In the same year that Revolverlution hit the charts, I Phantom by Mr. Lif became an instant classic in the world of underground hip-hop. Just a couple of years before that, we had Let’s Get Free by Dead Prez followed by Party Music by The Coup, and The Sneak Attack by KRS-One. Immortal Technique’s Revolutionary Vol.1 and 2 and Sonic Jihad by Paris set the bar for political rap on another level, with the latter being about the Bush-era politics which aimed to establish America’s preponderance of power in a unipolar new millenia. It really felt like staying the voice of the anti-establishment was the only way forward for hip-hop.
Sigh.
In another world, the post-Iraq War America continued to be the bedrock of amazing conscious rap, and pushed all music genres towards activism. In this other America, the Trovalds of the tech world, who championed non-centralized platforms, overpowered the Musks, who were just the latest rendition of the ownership class. In this world, the internet’s potential as an instant tool for connection created a world of wisdom, inclusion, and cooperation. The level playing field of the digital world empowered intersectional activism by laying bare the obvious connections in the struggles experienced among populations around the world.
Every time I re-read this interview, it is still relevant, on-topic, and illuminating. Without exaggeration, I get a clear sense of the path of the internet (and humanity) via this casual analysis of the state of American rap at the time by these two hip hop legends. Quote:
DAVEY D - Talk about the way people internationally view what you do and what we do over here. I recently made my first trip out of the country to Spain and it was real eye opening. The first thing that really struck me, was two things- one, how deep people get into the art....I mean they really study what comes out of here in the US and they usually know more than the people that create the art half the time.
The second thing is that, the amount of people who are up on politics. I mean I was looking at newspapers and trying to understand the TV and they were just covering stuff that we don’t even talk about over here in the states. Whether it is about then AIDS situation on down to what our own US president is doing. They were talking about stuff that has not even broken out over here. It was a real deep for me being the first time out of the country, but how do you see it after all these years of traveling around the world? How has that impacted the type of approach you have towards music?
CHUCK D - One quickly realizes that America has an arrogance and has had an arrogance for the last 100 years. That has permeated all the way down so that Hip-Hop artists talking about He’s the “King of New York”. This arrogance does not allow the US to see itself as a country alongside different countries. It looks at itself as a country above the rest of the world. Whereas when you went to Spain, you find that they have to think about the fact that they that we have to co-exist with other countries. To the East there is Italy or to the West there is Portugal. In an environment like that, one has to be able to discuss the world politic or be able to fit in.
The US is not about fitting in it is about dominating & thinking your cut above. This attitude is being permeated to a Black kid that is living in a Black area thinking he's gonna put it in a rap song like “Yo, I’m the King of the World”. What's sad is the fact that he don’t even know what the World is. It's a mentality that America would like Americans to believe so they can still control them. It goes down to your average rap song saying more fantasy then reality.
The rest of the world looks to Black people in the US. For a long period of time Black culture has transcended the world society because Black culture has made a statement against the world. We have been shipping our legacy since Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington & the Billie Holidays and now all the way up to where we are today. The problem now is when corporations have the final say-so over what should be said and how it should be said. That is a danger zone because nobody is gonna wanna say anything different, they're gonna wanna say the same thing b/c/ it works just to maintain their contract.
This interview is significant because it paints a picture of where America will end up in two decades, with all artistic creations, and every other aspect of humanity commodified, ready to be consumed and cannibalized, and production monopolized by those who accumulate the capital and go to any length to preserve it. Over the next two decades, as the American public had to come to terms with the cognitive dissonance of trickle-down economy and for-profit healthcare, for-profit prison system, for-profit forever wars and for-profit doom scrolls, we also got less and less conscious rappers and more and more “kings of the world:” village clows content to be the star of their niche microcultural corner of the internet, devoid of real connection and bound by the ever present threat of loss at the mercy of the actual kings who own their platforms.
But I digress. Let’s go back two decades once again, before YouTube was founded so that dudes could analyze Janet Jackson’s pasties. Chuck-D continues in the interview:
“When you try to make the perfect record & perfect promoting ways of putting a record to the forefront then a lot of people are gonna make similar moves. Those moves might not relate to different parts of the world but they still gonna look at the culture coming out of the US as the hot culture.”
I don’t know how aware he was about the specifics of what was brewing, but D was definitely onto something. The unique conditions created by the intersection of the early internet and the peak of conscious American rap served as a catalyst for the speedy yet organic creation of hip-hop scenes in various Middle Eastern countries. These countries had a large, young populations in search of accessible creative outlets to ideate, question, lament, and call for action against various oppressive power structures that had dominated the region ever since WWI. It was at this time that, as a teenager and aspiring graffiti artist living in Tehran, I also found my community among a handful of people (no really, literally handful) in a Yahoo group where we exchanged KRS-One and Mr. Lif and Technique and discussed which traditional Iranian poetry genres fit most with the cadence of a rap verse. This was not a group of people who would’ve crossed paths in the real world, not only because of the diversity of our backgrounds and localities, but due to the thought-policing system of rule in Iran, which made the internet the safest venue for uncensored dialogue.
The internet was the safest venue.
Not allowed to go out after dark due to having slightly strict and concerned parents, and not being rebellious enough to Rapunzel my way out of our 3rd-floor flat, I was slowly losing motivation to write graffiti since the daytime opportunities were rare and didn’t offer enough time for more than a glorified tag. Meanwhile, the internet offered endless freedoms. Soon, I was recording rap songs in Farsi and sharing them in Yahoo chats and on pre-Facebook social media platforms such as Myspace and Orkut (that were NOT founded so dudes could rate their female classmates’ looks), and unknowingly becoming a part of the forming of the Iranian Hip Hop scene in the early 2000s.
Looking back, my natural intuition as a rapper was to follow the footsteps of the likes of Mr. Lif, whose sociopolitical commentary is told through personal life experiences. I remember being mad at several American journalists who were trying to get a soundbite out of the young me with limited English skills. I knew they just wanted to add legitimacy to their preconceived narrative, crafted for a Western audience, who had just started to question the Iraq War. For them, of course, the first female rapper from a backwards Middle Eastern country that conveniently sounded like Iraq was too good a subject to let that same female rapper from a backwards Middle Eastern country that conveniently sounded like Iraq get in the way of their story. How dare she have an agency? Why wasn’t she just grateful that they even think she was worth their time?
My justified anger towards their oppression-porn angle was intuitive, but I didn’t have words for it back then. I told them what came to mind instinctively, that what I do is not political, it’s personal. I’m a person with a unique story, not a title. I’m not an activist, but an artist. This didn’t really work well, because then the story became that I have to say that to avoid being jailed in Iran.
However, the reality was that I, along with most of the world’s citizens, just didn’t have the luxury of perceiving “political” as some spicy topic to discuss on Sundays in your backyard BBQ party. Because if you’ve got a boot on your neck - which let’s be real in any hierarchical system you’ll have a boot choking you one way or another - personal is political and political is personal and whoever tries to tell you that they are separate concepts is not your friend. At best they are not making an effort to understand the very fundamental differences in the way you are experiencing the same society, and therefore are complicit, and at worst, they are actively participating in the systems that perpetuate the systemic injustices because it’s inconvenient not to do so.
So, needless to say, as the political climate in Iran heated up towards the end of the decade and erupted by the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, not only was I out there like the rest of the members of my generation demanding accountability, but my lyrics naturally reflected that intense urgency in that climate. Less metaphor-adorned personal experiences questioning the systemic flaws and more direct communication asking for immediate action, which is reflected 2009 interview that Davey D did with a younger me. It’s an Internet Archive archives link because I asked him to take it down soon after it was posted. Because, the safe internet was no more.
That brief window was now officially closed.
At this point the Iranian intelligence agency had its own cyber army like any other country in the world. They used this army to manufacture consert through crafted narratives and find targets to silence, which they did mostly through legal channels using drummed up charges. In some cases, we know of kidnappings and disappearances as well. Despite already using a pseudonym - Salome - as a rapper, I released my last few songs made in Iran with yet another secondary alias and with SD videos filmed on early camera phones from the protests that I edited into music videos. Soon, I left for Japan on an education scholarship and found refuge in the world of video and sound art. Since language was my weakest form of communication in my new country, I employed all the media I could that didn’t require it.
I released two more self-produced hip-hop albums. The first in 2012, about the existential questions that arose after immigrating out of Iran and the second in 2017, after a year of living in the US as a new immigrant once again, under the new Trump administration, no less. But soon after, I decided to stop rapping in Farsi as I believed my physical distance from my home country meant that my experiences no longer related to the people living there, who I considered my audience.
But that’s not the only reason.
By the late 2010s, with internet popularity becoming the default version of celebrity, the algorithmic audience was already fostering a world where even the most popular musicians had to play by certain rules of “engagement.” In Iran in the early aughts, we had used the internet's decentralized nature to access the right audience and foster community without having to be intentional about navigating online tools. By the late 2010s, cultivating a following online without having to use the invasive tools of the establishment had become nearly impossible. The internet now contained all the negative aspects of post-industrial societies, but with an artificial level of global reach and algorithm-supported power manipulation that wouldn’t have been possible without it.
To stay relevant, some of the conscious Iranian rappers who left after the 2009 protests had to appeal to shallow political activism or regurgitate their past lives for engagement, which somewhat works if your goal is just to stay relevant. Some switched to a more “king of the world” style entertainment, which was a more successful approach to sustaining their audience inside Iran, since an oppressed nation is also in need of escapism the most. A few others, me among them, stopped rapping slowly, as it became clear that the rules of this new era of the internet were not for us. But hip-hop, its values, and what it represents were inseparable with my identity as a storyteller, so drawing on my music production skills and affinity for listening (fostered in my day job as a journalist), I decided to amplify the voices of the young rappers living in Iran, fostering community through a project I founded during the pandemic.
After becoming a mother in 2018, my passion for the next generation and their voices went from side project to main project. I started conducting hip-hop workshops in public schools for underserved kids, somehow getting more joy from the simplest, misspelled rhymes of a nine-year-old girl with a visual impairment than in any of the hottest new rappers I barely get to listen to. As an artist with an intersectional approach to dismantling systems of oppression, who had met and worked with people from all kinds of backgrounds, agism had mostly escaped my consideration for various reasons. I had already started to question my understanding of the word “retirement” when I was in Japan, where modern society has somewhat managed to preserve roles for seniors to contribute meaningfully, which no doubt is one of the secrets behind their long life expectancy. However, during the pandemic, I started to visibly notice how the structure of our society has conditioned us to value the “productive” stage of our lives,- as defined by the owner class, while undermining and disregarding/limiting/undermining not only the valuable roles of the elderly, but the children’s as well. Often an afterthought in the redistribution of the tax money, the services for these two demographics are cut from the budget among the first, but don’t fret - there’s a for-profit industry to step right in instead. What’s not talked about is how the roles that the elderly and the children could mutually fulfill in society could help solve problems that were generated by their erasure in the first place. And these missing links in the chain of coherence of a society that are replaced by transactional, temporary zip ties, have ramifications well beyond anything I mentioned so far… But wait, all this rhetoric is getting out of hand, and solutions seem too abstract, too complicated, too far out-of-reach. Who's got time for all that when we’re aging rapidly and getting closer to becoming a burden and tossed out to a retirement home owned by a private equity owned by an LLC owned by a C-corp? Let me click on that skin-care ad real quick.
Where we are headed as American society and the citizens of the world is tightly connected to this shift in how we use the internet and thus how we connect as humans. Wherever we’re headed, it’s not good, at least not for a while. I am scared, not just for myself but for the next generation. For my two little boys. Over the past few years, I’ve watched the deliberate, systemic radicalization of young men online with horror, knowing that more likely than not, they are being groomed to be obedient soldiers to die for causes that have nothing to do with their well-being or their community’s. I am back in the mindset I was in the late 2000’s, with the same urgency, alarm, motivation. It’s been a while. And it’s different. My motivation doesn’t stem from the fire of youth but from the empathy of the old. And I’m not well-versed in the new rules of engagement online as I renounced them a long time ago. I don’t have the time or mind space to learn every new online tool for my work with the dedication of a teenager. I’m bewildered by the new internet jargon that has emerged from co-opting old concepts with a completely new meaning. How the fuck did the pill colors in The Matrix came to represent the Manosphere? Why is there a long-running, seemingly popular podcast named Red Scare with content that does not match its title at all? How on earth did Grimes transform into an alt-right icon? Where was I when all this was happening?
Real answer: I was busy spending the last decade trying to cultivate, IRL as the saying goes, the sense of belonging and safety I felt on the early 2000s internet. And, ironically, what kicked off this journey was the experience of the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan and its aftermath. To watch the superiority of sharing resources and skills (hello open source, non-monetized internet!) in action when actual survival was at stake was a beauty to behold. So was the following collaboration to rebuild, the hope, the resilience. I was still very much online, mind you, but not the way you are when you’re a person with a developing brain, looking for community and belonging that you can’t find IRL.
Sure, everything seems to be compromised now, both online and offline. But I’ve seen what it could be, both online and offline. Let me find my community and make radical art now, both online and offline.
This was the mindspace that I was in when I entered the CATS+ Residency.
Repository and the Algorithm that Never Happened
“People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.” -Linus Torvalds
Sometime towards the end of the residency, I was at MoHA working with Rose Ott, a former CATS+ resident, who was kindly helping me with her coding skills towards the execution of the initial idea of the Cat+Social, including a simple algorithm and a good chunk of Texas politics content.
I was mostly watching her figure out the next steps via a combination of skimming YouTube tutorials and copying code from one of those websites that assume you know what it means. Rose stopped every few steps to explain something, talking fast to the beat of the twinkles in her eyes, shining out of passion for the topics, putting me in a very good mood, even though the project itself seemed like it might be doomed.
Not only I was way behind in creating the video material for the so-called social media feed, which included one tutorial-style video by each resident that defied the rules of engagement of the current internet, but I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with the political content, feeling like I might be forcing my fellow residents to be associated with something that they might not be fully on-board with. And the tech side of things was very much behind, too, although you couldn’t tell from my early-internet-Iranian-hip-hop-community-level good mood. And why wouldn’t it be? I now had a GitHub repository to host the work, thanks to Rose, sharing her skills, collaborating for the sake of collaborating with someone she barely knew.
In one of our conversations, Rose mentioned Linux founder Linus Torvalds, and I immediately made a calendar event so I could remember to skim one of my favorite books when I get home: The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, prologue by Torvald, written by his friend Pekka Himanen. Since I was semi-stuck, I thought maybe a random page in the book might spark something - a traditional divination technique in Iran, usually done with Hafez poems. Although it’s another great product of that magical era of the early 2000s, I only read the book years later when it was given to me by my husband after having just moved to the U.S. in 2016. “The open source movement is the underground music movement of the software world,” I told him when I finished the book, “No wonder we get along.”
The Long-range Vision: Three Stages of Decimation
I started the CATS+ residency with a plan. Any art residency or long-term art project I do means a combination of:
- Loss of income, since I take time away from work
- Loss of time with children.
Because of this, I can’t afford to be too experimental about my artistic work. Add my alarmed state of mind and I was strict with how it all was gonna go. Meet artists who would naturally understand the urgency to create radical art in opposition to the country’s rapid decline into authoritarianism; focus on the results rather than the process; learn new tools for efficiency, not for the sake of learning. Urgency. Action. Be loud, be disruptive.
Of course, the CATS+ residency is pretty much the opposite of all that, which I realized soon enough, with an initial panic. What am I doing? Is this a mistake? Am I taking away precious time with my children to make some inconsequential techy art when we’re speeding towards a possible societal collapse, civil war, or worse?
I was at the risk of being the joyless party-pooper of the group, or worse, the doomsdayer old lady who wants everyone else to be as miserable as herself.
It took many, many stages of evolution and changes of direction through the course of the residency to arrive at Cats+ocial: a deliberately non-political, intentionally escapist piece that, on the surface, is opposite of the type of work I normally set out to do. Among the various experiences that helped me reorient and change my direction, three episodes stand out to me.
The first episode was when I was frank about my feelings, either at the first or second meeting. “I can’t afford to not be political, it’s where my mind is right now,” I shook my head. This was when I was still digesting the fact that I would have to reconcile my plans with the reality of the residency.
Solovino suggested that we could do a performance expressing how tired we all are, gasps and sighs, an idea that could make space for everyone’s angle to be expressed. My initial gut reaction was: no no we can’t afford to be tired, no, no, no, they want us tired, and demotivated, and accepting. We can’t afford that.
But I kept my mouth shut, because I was looking at a young working-class trans man with Mexican heritage. He looked tired both physically and mentally, while I was not. Sure, when I was his age, my gender put me under existential threat from the government and I went to Japan with a mere $100 in my pocket. But that was fifteen years ago, and now I was a citizen of the United States, married to a white man, and living in the suburbs with our two sons. I had my tubes removed during my last c-section and so I was not yet under existential threat from the Texan government. Furthermore, I had the privilege to work as a freelancer, managing my own time and affording to send my kids to daycare during the week, thanks to my husband’s tech job. Whatever mindstate I was in, I was not the same person who rapped in protest, anonymously, circumventing censorship and surveillance with the effortless finesse of a 16 year olds’ neuroplastic brain. What a fool I was being. I felt ashamed.
The second episode was when we were choosing a visual for the showcase poster. Someone suggested an edited picture taken by Rachel after Brianna’s demo.
I felt uncomfortable with the visual, although everyone else liked it. I instantly knew why, but I was not exactly sure how to express it. I looked goofy in the picture, and there isn’t a single goofy picture of me online. There are only a handful of pictures of me online in the first place, and almost all were taken by me, for a purpose. In any setting that I’m Salome MC, I don’t present as goofy. Goofiness is a quality I value in myself only when offered to an intended audience, extracting laughs for a momentary exchange of joy, a brief reprieve from all that came before and all that’s about to come.
I did not want an image of me put out there in full view of today’s online environments, to an unknown audience where every laugh and tear is commodified in a battle royale to extract emotion, any emotion, towards a transactional engagement: like, comment, save, share. Engagement that is merely a hollow connection with no substance, that always leaves you thirsty for more– one more swipe, one more click– while ultimately only benefiting the ones who own it all.
But I didn’t say any of this because I hadn’t arrived there just yet, all I could say was: “My goofy face is not for the public,” as I left the room, once again feeling ashamed. But this time ashamed for not having a real explanation for rejecting something that everyone wanted and possibly coming across as full of myself.
The last episode was, fittingly, the Himanen book divination, a week before the showcase, and after I went back home from as an owner of a github repository. The book divination didn’t work on the first attempt, obviously. I opened to the epilogue, about genetic engineering, a part I don’t remember ever reading. I tried a few more times, like you do, and eventually I found the paragraphs below on pages 70-71 that fit what I wanted. Yes, this is exactly how divination functions, and I’ve always been a believer.
“Both scientists and hackers have learned from experience that the lack of strong structures is one of the reasons why this model is so powerful, Hackers and scientists can just start to realize their passions and then network with other individuals who share them. This spirit clearly differs from that found not only in business but also in government. In governmental agencies, the idea of authority permeates an action even more strongly than it does in companies. For the hackers, the typical governmental way of having endless meetings, forming countless committees, drafting tedious strategy papers, and so on before anything happens is at least as great a pain as doing market research to justify an idea before you can start to create. (It also irritates scientists and hackers no end when the university is turned into a governmental bureaucracy or monastery.)
In short, the hacker ethic rejects the Protestant work ethic’s sacrifice of joy for productivity, instead prioritizing purpose over profit, networks over hierarchies, and passion over obligation. Without realizing it, the plans I had made for the residency came with a rigidity that was the antithesis of my decade-long community-oriented approach. I realized I could not, and should not, have the same mindset that I had had as a combat-boots wearing 16-year-old.
The foundations for Cats+cial were already there, and all I needed was to accept the inevitable.
Reclaiming the Title of “Village Clown” and the Conclusion
The idea of the village as a microcosm of community is ancient, yet it persists in our globalized age. Community and society are distinct, as the former thrives on personal bonds, while the latter operates on impersonal structures. The village clown belongs to the community, as their art is relational, shaped by shared history, known references, and inside jokes. Their role is vital, as it offers a reprieve from the burden of survival. Most importantly, the village clown can function as a subversive figure who disrupts hierarchies through laughter, binding like glue, rather than divide. But what about on a digitized, algorithm-fed global stage?
As artists, we love to connect, and the primitive intuition says the bigger, the better. Everyone understands heartbreak, no matter where they come from, just as most people understand the struggles of being confined to the lower castes of society and being told it’s their fault they’re stuck. No matter what kind of story you tell, someone on the other half of the world might better empathize with your experience than your next-door neighbour. This is exhilarating, especially if you are a younger artist who is looking for a sense of belonging that doesn’t exist in your physical community. So it was no surprise that sharing on the internet speedily became the norm for artists, musicians, and other members of groups looking for belonging. And they did indeed find it online. Music, helped by ever-evolving compression technology, was the most suitable for the online world, and soon other types of creative work followed.
Of course, it did not go unnoticed that a massive number of people with shared interests and a need for belonging could be exploited to generate profit. Within a mere decade of the initial democratization of the the early age of social media, it had turned into a massive marketplace for products with creepily targeted ads. I still remember the first targeted ad I ever saw online, and the strange mixed sense of loss and fear it induced. I also remember when I told my then-boyfriend (now husband) that I preferred for some private company to use my info and show me a useless ad than for the government to have my info. An American who was once part of the open source community, as well as the Anti-Iraq War movement, he laughed at my naivete, and said there’s no way our info won’t eventually end up in the government's hands.
Over the years, we watched closely every time the public’s right to privacy was breached by governments asking private companies for user data. The breaches were big news at first, then less important, and eventually very low in the headlines if they even made news at all.
Unfortunately for the generations that came after me, the plutocrats of this age are not just chilling in their yachts with senators and judges and talking about how they can avoid public scrutiny and government probs. No, the plutocrats are now the ones conducting the government probes, owning all the media and communication and social media platforms that are used to control, manipulate, and silence the public. The plutocrats control the security apparatuses and surveillance tools, so our online data is not just used to make us feel bad about being a woman with wrinkles and to spend money on their products. Now, our online data is also used to target us for our civic participation, community organizing, or even for making a simple comment. I know this internet very well, but at the same time not really. It’s somewhat similar to the one I thought I escaped in 2010, but also, unrecognizably worse. So much worse.
This internet, like all technological advances in human history, has been weaponized. Through disinformation campaigns, algorithmic echo chambers, and targeted propaganda, bad actors exploit social media to inflame political, racial, and ideological tensions - but somehow never a class struggle. State-sponsored trolls, extremist networks, and profit-driven individual grifters manipulate emotions using fake news, deepfakes, and harmful conspiracy theories to sow doubt in democratic institutions and the power of facts. This internet polarizes mostly young men who have either lost or never learned to cultivate a community in real life, detached from their elders, disconnected from their young. Instead they find belonging in echo chambers that give them a false sense of purpose. With the erosion of trust in institutions and societal fractures deepening, it is no wonder that the hatred spills into real world violence. As I am writing this, Just yesterday, two Minnesota state senators were shot along with their spouses. And the long-awaited Iran war is closer than ever. I’ve lost communication with my family and friends as U.S.-made bombs subsidized by my taxes are dropped in residential areas in Tehran and other big cities.
However, at the risk of coming across as naive, I don’t feel fully defeated yet, and the Cats+cial experiment has helped in my convictions. I believe the nature of the internet can still offer purpose over profit, networks over hierarchies, and passion over obligation. A hopeful vision where all the community-minded artists and their audiences take a collective, decisive action to reject monopolized, centralized platforms owned by the plutocrats. And I don’t mean deleting Twitter and moving to another umbrella platform destined to be bought out, but adopting truly decentralized networks with smaller platforms, websites and forums, similar to the open source communities. Self-hosted and collectively supported simple gathering places free from algorithmic considerations to find the right audience, since the clown and the villagers are already connected through online locality and shared history. At an individualistic level, this seems near impossible to achieve; but as a worldwide, grassroots coordinated effort spread with word of mouth, village by village? Maybe. Rejecting the monopoly of surveillance platforms is not just a moral stance or a principled action, but an act of survival. These platforms are not only the main drivers of division through selling rage and fear, but are in cahoots with executive - and supposedly independent judicial - powers to police speech and assembly through intimidation, and worse. No matter how radical our message is and how much of an activist we are, by continuing to rely on these platforms and their rules of engagement, we contribute to the division among people AND the empowerment of the plutocrats.
There is a translation of one of my songs in the Chuck-D interview above that I had kind of forgotten about, since like many other bedroom productions of early 2000s, it was lost on the dirt roads of the online villages as the internet rapidly industrialized towards its gilded age. So it was a bit chilling when I found the interview for the sake of this article and saw the lyrics. The translation is rough as I did it myself back then, but the idea is straightforward. Withdrawing from our increasingly dystopian world to raise vegetables and make laurels in our community gardens reliant on city water supply is also not the answer either, even though you can see this sentiment echoed in many so-called radical leftist circles these days.
What’s radical is actively rejecting being pawns in the creation of the dystopian future laid out for us, not the others, but all of us. And good news is we can be radicals while sharing cat videos and cooking instructions.
I am motivated, have some vague ideas, and can’t do it alone. Let’s connect. https://salomemc.com
