Disquiet

This is from the Disquiet Junto email project announcement newsletter than goes out Thursday, January 22, 2026, shortly after midnight Pacific Time:

We get used to — if not entirely inured to — the buggy vagaries of the software platforms we spent our time on.

I experienced a troubling such instance of the phenomenon this week, when I uploaded a #Jamuary track to my SoundCloud account. My fairly rudimentary music was instantly flagged for copyright infringement, even though what I had recorded sounded nothing like the track that was singled out as the supposed source material.

Fortunately, my challenge to the infraction notification was deemed satisfactory by whatever software algorithm or employee intervention occurred. My track eventually went live, and my SoundCloud account was not erased from the internet. However, the experience lingered as a potent reminder of how fragile these systems are, and all the more so our connections to them.

Part of the reason the Disquiet Junto has always been on multiple platforms — originally primarily SoundCloud and Twitter (RIP) — is so there’s always a place for conversation, for people to convene and share. Upload to SoundCloud, post on Lines, share on Instagram, chat on Mastodon, listen on Bandcamp, and on and on.

There is no requirement, for example, to be on SoundCloud. Plenty of people post to Bandcamp, YouTube, and elsewhere. To the extent the Disquiet Junto is even “on” SoundCloud, we’re on there because that’s where we started, and the service is still around, and no platform, apart perhaps from YouTube, has suggested itself as dependable and functional in a way that might serve the (seemingly simple) structure of our weekly activities.

Why, you may be wondering, isn’t there an official Junto home on the web? I’ve run the scenarios many times alone and with others, and setting up our own platform, while enticing in theory, has its own inherent problems. Those perceived complications don’t mean we won’t do it someday, but it’s not the priority. The platform isn’t where my main thoughts are. My main thoughts are with ideas that encourage people to make music, to explore new ways of making things, and to communicate (non-verbally for the most part) with each other across borders: linguistic, cultural, and so forth. My main thoughts are about observing activity within the Junto, and in turn both developing new projects and absorbing ones proposed by members of the community. That’s what happens. Where it happens matters less, and so long as it happens lots of places, the Disquiet Junto is in good shape.