archive

Moreover, billionaires’ extravagant wealth is by and large not spent, as Zuckerberg suggests, on cutting edge research and philanthropic efforts. After they’ve bought up enough yachts and private jets they mainly invest in making themselves richer through casino-style financial speculation and in luxury real estate in starkly unequal cities like San Francisco, Miami and New York, where mostly vacant homes act as safety deposit boxes to shield wealth from taxation. Their money might also end up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, where it can sit undisturbed by the long arm of the state. Very little of that ever trickles down to the 99%, where inequality has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.

“I remember that when I worked on the Buchla at NYU for Chry-Ptus there were those sounds that I got by feedback, which I tried to find again with the synthesizer,” she recalled in an interview with Emmanuel Holterbach. “Beatings, pulsations, sustained sounds that evolved by beats, a kind of transposition of the re-injection procedure. It’s just that with the Buchla you could control things much more rigorously and it was I myself who made them move. At the same time I also kept the system of two tapes, which could play with a different synchronization. I kept that principle of mobility. It is improvising by itself all the time. In some way it is improvising itself.”