This playlist was created from music I listened to while I researched and wrote
"Towards Congestion Control Deployment in Tor-like Networks", from March
through May 2020, before the murder of George Floyd.

This playlist is composed almost entirely of conscious Hip Hop. Hip Hop has
spent its 50 year existence being marginalized, demonized, censored from
radioplay, and ignored by music awards. Despite 50 years of systematic
oppression built upon 400 years of explicit and then economic slavery, Hip Hop
is now the most popular music genre in the world.

The ascent of Hip Hop is undoubtedly due to the relentless persistence of the
artists in the genre, even in the face of death. 

To me, even before Floyd died, Hip Hop was the obvious choice for listening
material as I worked to figure out a way to fairly distribute all Tor traffic,
which, as the analysis shows, will provide a faster and stronger anonymity
network for all.

However, after Floyd died, I almost didn't post this playlist. By that point,
this playlist was complete, as was my research for my post. But it was just
too hard-hitting. Too real, too raw, too soon. I spent sleepless nights
listening to the playlist and reordering it, alternating between raging and
weeping... trying to figure out what, if anything, I could possibly do that
would make any difference what-so-ever.

I waited a full week, and then some, until I was inspired by a brief rant by
Duncan Trussel at the beginning of one of his podcasts, which I have added to
this playlist, at the end.

Weeks earlier, I had already selected Duncan Trussel and Sam Tripoli for a
podcast intermission, during which they battle for the title of Ultimate
Stoner, for some comic relief, before the Black Helicopters arrive. I did not
expect Duncan to somehow, miraculously, answer back, even though we have
neither met nor spoken.

Like Duncan, I will never fully understand the oppression of people like
George Floyd, who have endured centuries of oppression and survived, only to
have their lives coldly snuffed out, while bystanders helplessly looked on in
shock.

With respect to that great injustice, and so many others like it, I can only
express my deepest sorrow, outrage, and solidarity.

What I can give is a bitter-sweet warning from my own vantage point on
technology.

It has been said that the ascent of Hip Hop has been aided by Internet
streaming and the relative freedom of Internet media, compared to centralized
radio broadcasting and pay-for-play (de)promotion.

Contemporaneously: during the period from March to May 2020, the world fully
embraced life on the Internet, freeing us from the restrictions of space and
dampening the harm of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Except for one problem: the most popular applications on the Internet run on
centrally-owned infrastructure, funded by surveillance capitalism. And while
they have given a voice to the oppressed and voiceless, they will not solve
endemic oppression.

Our reliance on centralized systems is causing society to choose easy,
cost-effective "solutions" to information warfare based on censorship and
oppression, rather than resilience and understanding. Rather than provide
people with the tools to verify facts themselves, centralized systems are
predictably choosing to censor and suppress information, because it is cheaper
to do so, in the short-term.

As the prescience of this playlist suggests, this centralized control is
failing in very predictable ways. 

On major platforms, people are being de-platformed and unpersoned, literally
for thoughtcrime. People who use Tor and VPNs are also getting locked out of
their accounts, and dark patterned with poor-UX Captchas that "randomly"
totally fail, when used with privacy preserving technology that impacts the
bottom line of surveillance capitalism.

However objectionable this thoughtcrime actually is, censoring it is not the
answer. I have no illusions about how deep the rabbithole goes. Conspiracy
theories, fake news, drug addiction, child porn, and even the minimal
but non-zero level of misogyny in this very playlist -- these things must be
countered by tools that facilitate the arrival at consensus on truth and
well-being, rather than trying to bury the counterculture, or oppress
undesirable speech and behavior.

But that is not the half of it. I believe in technology. But the trajectory is
a perilous one. Even if computation manages to survive the TLA-funded exploit
war, the cryptowars, and the corrosive effects of centralized surveillance
capitalism, the future is still not necessarily a bright one.

Even in Elon Musk's Glorious Future, we will find ourselves having to choose
between being at best pets, and at worst slaves, of the Algorithm. Our data
is hoovered up to predict our actions and manipulate our emotions. This
trajectory has a great deal of momentum behind it, from social media to
state-sponsored behavioral prediction research:
  https://techxplore.com/news/2020-03-humans-artificial-intelligence-future.html

As a benign example of the inability to trust centralized infrastructure:
while I created this playlist, Spotify decided to ban Serato, Djay, and all
other DJ software from being used with its platform. The reasons for this
escape me, as even DJs who used the platform in this way tend to purchase
copies of their music for offline use, because streaming is not reliable for
live performance anyhow. It is however, useful for experimentation and genre
exploration like this, all of which have been coldly exterminated in the
service of platform protection and content control:
  https://www.algoriddim.com/streaming-migration/

I encourage you to get your music on other platforms, eg Tidal or Soundcloud,
instead. Unfortunately, in this case, other services did not have all of these
podcasts and tracks.

Therefore, this playlist is available at:
  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6qnZborFHEBQEO5A6Z1KEc


P.S. If you too are wondering what you can do, please see this excellent article:
  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7kpb9a/how-to-protest-racist-violence-instead-of-posting-blackout-tuesday-square