california’s wide expanses of nothingness -

between bustling metropolises of

los angeles’s identity crises and

silicon valley riches -

are where i find stars and quiet

wind and road

peace and rest.

in these

bless-ed early morning moments

sunrise tarries, hours away

we trade secrets underneath

the sheets.

i am human

and so are you.

an invented people

means

your humanity is

questionable

fairy tales

have no human rights

in the 21st century.

newmodelminority:

“Actually, if all goes according to plan, the two might have more control, and on a broader scale, than someone like Comcast CEO Brian Roberts does. YouTube would be everything Comcast is—cable operator and network—and more. Comcast doesn’t get to sell ads against most of the programming on its cable system (with the exceptions, of course, of those channels it owns, as well as the minimal minutes alloted it by each channel). No network would dream of giving cable operators that kind of power. But that’s exactly the position YouTube finds itself in under the new arrangement. And YouTube already has many more eyeballs than even the biggest cable operators in the U.S. Comcast, for example, has 22.4 million subscribers. YouTube has 800 million unique users worldwide each month.”

—

Beyond Cat Videos

Is YouTube on the brink of becoming a programming star? By D.M. Levine

@afrolicious Given our conversation yesterday about digital Black online cultural productions by and for Black girls. And @mqueez given our conversations about your work online….how does this + mobile factor into the future of Black girl online stuff. I am building an agenda for our next Black girls are from the future call, and I think this is going to be an agenda item. Shit I may just collect some stuff for us all to read then come together and discuss.

girl… you got me out of hibernation for this…

let’s talk about the internet. not cute blind kittens or turquoise jeep internets, nah. the real, physical, material hardware of the internet is all pipes. just a connection of pipes laid by verizon, at&t, comcast, timewarner #anem. that’s the internet. without those pipes? no youtube, tumblr, facebook, twitters, newmodelminority.com or afrolicious.com (#noshame)

whoever owns the pipes owns the internet.

yes, youtube is huge with 800 million+ viewers. but comcast owns the pipes that connect 22.4 million of them to the internet. once comcast (and other carriers) starts providing content, it’s game over unless youtube has positioned itself properly.

that is why speculation that verizon buying netflix out is huge. verizon owns pipes. netflix is just the software that flows through the pipes. youtube is interesting because google owns it, but i’m not so sure if google owns enough pipes yet. you know of anybody who pays a google internet bill?

so… ideally brown girls want to own pipes so other brown girls and boys can be subversive on the internet. the real internet. in the meantime, we are situated in the middle ground, between content and carriers. while we are creators and storytellers trying to carve out our own voices in the human chorus, we have to be cognizant of who the carriers are and who benefits from propagating subversive content over those pipes.

got pipes?