When you do sound design, you work with a bunch of different waveforms, different patterns of sound. You’ve got the sine wave, which smoothly oscillates up and down. You’ve got the square wave, which shifts immediately between two positions. You’ve got the triangle wave, which is like a sine wave that comes to a point at the top and the bottom of the cycle.
And you’ve got the saw wave, in which the wave builds linearly, then collapses in an instant.
I used to think of history as a sine wave, an ebb and flow.
These days, I think about the saw wave, ripping through history. We build our rights, we build our lives, and in an instant, the forces of reaction destroy them.
I came up an anarchist, a revolutionist. Revolution seemed like the tip of that saw wave, a moment of destruction when all the evil systems come toppling down. The neck of the billionaire might just be the gordian knot, easier to cut than untie. I’m still an anarchist, but I’ve inverted my thinking on the subject – most of our work is the building. Building systems of care, safety, and trust takes work, the kind of thankless work that we put in day after day. The revolution is built free meal by free meal. It’s built through phone calls with friends who need support. We build the revolution when we build workers cooperatives and when we build alliances. The violence in our work is generally the violence of defending things that have been built.
Even some of our wildest plans – like seizing the means of the production from the bourgeois – are fundamentally about, well, defending what is ours. The billionaires did not work with their hands to build the factories and machinery; workers did that.
