This panel identifies and explores digital connectivities and capacities for social, personal and political rupture generated by diverse networked practices of sound production and consumption. The aim of the panel is to collectively examine and reimagine how digital audio media, incorporating podcasts, radio archives, AI-generated music, and audio erotica variously enable and encourage connection and intimacy in ways that challenge the limitations of an increasingly normative and oppressive digital media environment—whether neo-fascist. neoliberal, anti-feminist, or simply Puritanical.

The first paper examines how podcasts devoted to the “Dark Enlightenment” are sonic vectors for the creation of the distributed and networked masculine neo-fascist subject, a relationship of sonic subjection the authors term “streaming molecular fascism.” The second paper explores the possibilities of an alternative digital archive of activist programming in the current context of increased disinformation, restrictions and surveillance across online platforms. The third paper asks whether the rise of “AI”-generated music will increase concentration and exploitation, or whether it presents enough of a rupture in the productive matrix and aesthetic field to offer liberation for creative professionals. The fourth paper investigates how the digital and intimate nature of podcasting provides a private and personal place of sorts for the audience to listen to advice, discussion, and mental health self-disclosure. The fifth paper examines the potential of sex-positive audio erotica apps and platforms to both make and break a sense of intimacy and proximity with its listeners, while producing a rupture of sorts in a sex-negative digital media landscape