---
title: "Lessons in how not to be heard"
has_lessons: []
---
# Lessons in how not to be heard

![ML](static/images/01-1280x706.gif)


## Lesson 1: How to become inaudible by disabling silicon ears

With difficulty; name machine listening as an object of political contestation and struggle; describe some of its features, as they are clarified by the pandemic; become an artist becoming a paradigm dissident; dismantle capitalism and abolish big data, since they are increasingly difficult to disentangle; produce a diverse counterculture of machine listening; demonstrate and mock machine listening in its thoughtlessness; demonstrate and mock the machine listening industry in its thoughtlessness; write a policy document, but with artists as well as lawyers; destroy the data centres; fuck the algorithm.

## Lesson 2: How to be inaudible in the presence of microphones

Tear them down or rip them out; be somewhere loud; mask your speech with noise; jam signals; invent the privacy industry; never use a telephone, or a smart speaker, or a car, or a city; ask Siri; cover your laptop with sticky tape; have a speech disorder; write a manifesto on audio luddism; invent new languages; autotune everything; be female and over 50, or indigenous.

## Lesson 3: How to make yourself inaudible by being out of earshot

Be very quiet; refuse to attend the teleconference; live in the right neighbourhood; be a member of a group that machine listeners don't care about; be a member of a group they care about a lot; use encrypted audio; spend the evening doomscrolling the machine listening apocalypse.

## Lesson 4: How to become inaudible by merging into a world of operational sound

Speak in code; become the code you speak; entitle your next album Adversarial Music Synthesizer (Threat Model); embed subliminal messages in it, but for Alexa; get an Amazon Halo for Christmas; get your cough medicine delivered the day before you start coughing; allow machine listening's attempted perfection of the subject to extinguish the subject.  

## Lesson 5: How to be inaudible by having nothing to hide

Enjoy being listened to; get your coronavirus diagnosis over the phone; get your coronavirus diagnosis without asking to be tested; let google book your haircut for you; ask your voice assistant for advice about your polyamorous relationship; listen to "ambient music for reading" on your smart headphones, forever; become and evangelist of technosolutionism; allow yourself to be convinced that the main problem is privacy; petition the court for access to your partner's Alexa archive; enjoy extraordinary rendition and extrajudicial drone killings; enjoy being unable to get a loan or access state services and not knowing why.

# Bibliography