The Autonomist with the privatized tank glares as you take a wide angle selfie with the unbuilt environment. He’s thinking, she doesn’t even get it. She has no appreciation for my culture. What the fuck is she doing here if she’s not gonna give me top?

After a moment, you look up to see a group of liberal arts students staring in both incredulity and disgust. You’re not like them—you’ve never read Fred Moten, Jackie Wang, or The Invisible Committee. You’re K-holed. They’re drinking IPAs. You’re dressed up for a party. They’re dressed down for a war. You’re trying to dance. They’re trying to discourse. You’re seeking safety. They’re seeking destruction. Peace, love, unity, and respect (PLUR) don’t exist here. So, you’re left with one option: start a culture war.

If privilege has shielded you your entire life, you might be a little bored. You might be inclined to take up ethnography as a pastime—or worse, you might even write a manifesto no one asked for. This, unbeknownst to you in your moment of crisis, will be your demise. Artist and polymath Johanna Owen describes this phenomenon as, “anthro-apologizing”—a methodology so devoid of sincerity it warrants its own branding. She posits: Rather than exploiting people for your own cultural gain, simply consider staying in your lane. I concur.

Info.shop LA, the self-proclaimed, “Radical print media and distribution project,” has critiqued the local rave model for its lack of insurgence. Their analysis, in the form of an anonymous manifesto (most of their members are white, hence the anonymity), contributes little beyond delusional meanderings—reliant on hyperbole and revisionist history. People seem to be having fun at parties, instead of reflecting on death and systemic inequality. To these anarchists, your smile alludes to your woeful ignorance. As Kourtney famously told Kim, “There are people dying.” Apparently, “In 2021 we made a bet. That the riotous energy of the 2020 uprisings would seep its way into the cracks of the Los Angeles underground” (Info.shop 1). No black person made this bet, to bring the trauma of mass police killings to a rave. Anywhere. They continue, “Punks and ravers joyously fought back with fireworks and choruses of fuck 12” (Info.shop 1) as police in helicopters disseminated rubber bullets into the crowd. I’m assuming said punks and ravers were white. It’s exciting getting to play the hero, all you have to do is take a rubber bullet to the chest. But that’s the thing isn’t it? It’s just rubber.

This inherent frustration with the zeitgeist is indicative of an ideology in crisis. It’s true, “Nostalgia won’t get us anywhere” (Info.shop 1) but neither will deluded heroism. “Notes on the LA Rave Scene” reads more as a pissing contest than a call to action. Any attempt at a sincere dialogue is undermined by an extreme condescension—there is an impenetrable solipsism, or rather the illusion of omniscience throughout the piece. As Adrian Piper noted in her famed essay, “Ideology, Confrontation, and Political Self-Awareness” (1981), this illusion enables one to:

Forget that you are perceiving and experiencing other people from a perspective that is, in its own ways, just as subjective and limited as theirs. Thus you confuse your personal experiences with objective reality, and forget that you have a subjective and limited self that is selecting, processing and interpreting your experiences in accordance with its own limited capacities…the result is a blindness to the genuine needs of other people, coupled with the arrogant and dangerous conviction that you understand those needs better than they do; and a consequent inability to respond to those needs politically in genuinely effective ways. (Piper 3)

In the absence of self-reflection, zealots are made. Introspection is the only way through.

The people behind Info.shop don’t understand my culture and I don’t understand theirs. So, should we agree to disagree? Should we be separate but equal? Or can these, “Club-modeled parties dressed up like raves” (Info.shop 1) create space for subversion? These are questions I will leave you with, as I don’t have all the answers yet.