Hate & Non-Human Listening, an Introduction
In January 2026, WIRED reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun using Palantir’s AI tools to process public tip-line submissions. The system does not simply store or relay these reports. It processes English-language submissions, condensing them into what is called a “BLUF”—a “bottom line up front” summary that allows agents to quickly assess and prioritize cases.
Efficiency is the dominant framing as the system promises speed, clarity, and control over overwhelming volumes of information. Yet such efficiency depends on a prior reduction as expression is detached from the conditions of its articulation and reconstituted as data. In this form, listening no longer risks misunderstanding, it eliminates it.
Nor does this infrastructure operate in isolation. It relies on distributed participation in which listening is recast as vigilance. A recent ICE public X (Twitter) post encouraged residents to report “suspicious activity,” assuring them that doing so would make their communities safer.
The language is familiar, even reassuring. But it depends on a prior act of interpretation: that certain voices, presences, or behaviors are already legible as threat. Listening here becomes pre-classification—identifying danger in advance and acting on that identification as if it were already known. Rather than an isolated case, this development signals a broader transformation in how immigration and enforcement are governed. As legal and policy analyses increasingly note, artificial intelligence is becoming “one of the fundamental operating tools of policing,” deployed across domains ranging from speech and text analysis to risk assessment and document verification. Systems such as USCIS’s Evidence Classifier, which tags and prioritizes key documents within case files, and platforms like ImmigrationOS, which aggregate data across agencies to guide enforcement decisions, do not simply process information—they reorganize it. What matters is not only what is said, but whether it aligns—across time, across records, across bureaucratic expectations. Listening becomes continuous and anticipatory, oriented toward detecting inconsistency, deviation, and risk before any claim can be made or contested.
A very different narrative circulates alongside these developments. A recent BBC article suggested that AI chatbots can function as unusually “good listeners”—patient, nonjudgmental, even compassionate. Users describe these systems as offering space for reflection, sometimes preferring them to human interlocutors. Yet what is at work is not attention or relation, but pattern recognition trained to simulate understanding. Taken together, these examples reveal a shared transformation. Across both enforcement systems and everyday interaction, listening is increasingly detached from sensation, exposure, and accountability, becoming a process of extraction and classification rather than relation. As Dorothy Santos argues in her account of speech AI, machines do not simply assist human listening; they assume its position, becoming “the listeners to our sonic landscapes” while also acting as the capturers, surveyors, and documenters of our utterances. What follows from this shift is not just a change in who listens, but in what listening is. Listening no longer names an encounter between subjects; it describes a technical operation distributed across infrastructures that register, store, and act on sound without ever hearing it.
This shift is what I call “nonhuman listening.”
Nonhuman listening names both an infrastructural condition and a set of practices through which listening is reorganized as a technical operation. It describes a mode of perception distributed across systems that capture, process, and act on sound without exposure to it as experience, as well as the procedures—classification, ranking, prediction—through which sound is rendered actionable in advance. At stake is not simply the emergence of new technologies, but a reorganization of what listening has long been understood to do. Listening unfolds across thresholds of perception, attention, and care, shaped by what can be sensed, cultivated, or ignored. From its earliest formulations, it has been understood not as passive reception but as an ethically charged capacity. Aristotle’s distinction between akousis (hearing) and akroasis (listening) marks this divide, reserving listening for forms of attention capable of judgment and response. In this sense, listening has always named both openness and control: a posture of receptivity toward others and a way of organizing the world.
Nonhuman listening amplifies an older logic: not all voices are heard, and not all forms of speech register as meaning and listening does not begin from neutrality. Norms organize it in advance, determining what registers as signal, who gets to hear, and whose speech counts as intelligible. Meaning and noise do not inhere in sound itself; they emerge through historically sedimented expectations about voice, difference, and belonging.
Sound studies has long challenged the assumption that listening inherently connects or humanizes. Listening does not operate as an immediate or intimate relation; it relies on frameworks that precondition perception. Jonathan Sterne shows that claims about sonic immediacy function less as empirical truths than as ideological formations—narratives that naturalize particular social arrangements while obscuring how listening renders some forms of speech legible and others unintelligible. Listening does not simply receive the world—it organizes it.
At the same time, theoretical and experimental approaches foreground the instability of this organization. Voices do not exist as stable entities prior to their mediation; they “show up as real,” as Matt Rahaim writes, through specific practices and infrastructures that render them intelligible, contested, or indeterminate. Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualizes listening as resonance, emphasizing exposure—the possibility that listening might unsettle the subject—while also underscoring that such openness never distributes evenly. John Cage and Pauline Oliveros treat listening as a disciplined practice that requires cultivation and can fail as easily as it attunes. Listening is not given; it is trained.
Across these accounts, listening operates within regimes of power. Jacques Attali locates listening within governance, where institutions determine what can be heard, what must be silenced, and what becomes disposable. Trauma and memory studies intensify these stakes. Henry Greenspan shows that listening to testimony never occurs as a singular or sufficient act, and that extractive modes of attention can reproduce violence rather than alleviate it. Ralina L. Joseph’s concept of radical listening reframes listening as an ethical orientation—one that demands accountability to power, difference, and fatigue, and that attends to how speakers wish to be heard. As she writes, “the easiest way to refuse to listen is to keep talking.”
Taken together, these accounts point to a more difficult claim: listening is not simply uneven—it is directional. It can orient toward exposure and relation, or toward certainty and verification. When listening turns toward certainty, it no longer encounters speech as an address. It apprehends it in advance while certain voices register not as claims or appeals, but as warnings or threats.
Such orientation has precedents that are neither abstract nor metaphorical. During the 1937 Parsley Massacre, Dominican soldiers used pronunciation as a test of belonging. Suspected Haitians were asked to say the word perejil (parsley); those whose speech did not conform to expected phonetic norms were identified as foreign and often killed. Listening here did not register meaning or intent. It functioned as classification—reducing speech to a signal of difference and acting on that difference as if it were already known.
This logic persists in contemporary enforcement practices, albeit in different registers. Recent encounters with U.S. immigration agents reveal how accent continues to operate as a proxy for suspicion and a trigger for intervention. In multiple reported incidents, individuals have been stopped or detained and asked to account for their citizenship on the basis of how they sound: “Because of your accent,” one agent stated when asked to justify the demand for documentation . In another case, an agent explicitly linked auditory difference to disbelief, telling a driver, “I can hear you don’t have the same accent as me,” before repeatedly questioning where he was born.
In these moments, listening again operates as pre-classification. Accent is not heard as variation, history, or movement, but as evidence—an audible marker of non-belonging that precedes and justifies further scrutiny. What is at stake is not mishearing, but a mode of listening trained to stabilize difference as risk. Speech becomes legible only insofar as it confirms or disrupts an already established expectation of who belongs.
Early analyses of digital surveillance anticipated a more radical transformation than they could yet fully name. Writing in 2014, Robin James identified an emerging “acousmatic” condition in which listening detaches from any identifiable listener and disperses across systems of data capture and analysis. The 2013 Snowden disclosures make clear that this shift was not theoretical but already operational. State surveillance had moved from targeted interception to total capture, amassing communications indiscriminately and deriving “suspicion” only after the fact, as a pattern extracted from within the dataset itself. Listening no longer responds to a known object; it produces the object it claims to detect. What registers as “suspicious” does not precede analysis but materializes through algorithmic filtering, where signal and noise become effects of the system’s design rather than properties of the world. Under these conditions, listening ceases to function as a sensory or interpretive act and instead operates as an infrastructural logic of sorting, ranking, and preemption. Contemporary platforms extend and normalize this logic. They do not hear sound; they process it, rendering it actionable without ever encountering it as experience.
The essays collected in this series extend this transformation across distinct but interconnected domains, tracing how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media. Across these accounts, listening no longer secures meaning or relation; it becomes a site of contestation, where sound is mobilized, processed, and weaponized within systems that privilege circulation, recognition, and response over truth. Next week, Olga Zaitseva-Herz situates these dynamics within the context of digital warfare, where AI-generated voices, deepfakes, and synthetic media circulate as instruments of psychological manipulation, designed to provoke affective responses that travel faster than verification.
Contemporary speech technologies make this continuity visible at the level of language itself. As work in the Racial Bias in Speech AI series shows, particularly as Michelle Pfeifer demonstrates, speech technologies do not simply fail to recognize certain speakers; they formalize assumptions about what counts as intelligible language in the first place. In these systems, the voice is not encountered as expression but as input—something to be parsed, categorized, and aligned with existing datasets. When AI systems encounter African American Vernacular English—especially emergent idioms shaped by Black and queer communities—language is flattened into surface definitions, stripped of cultural grounding, or flagged as inappropriate. Speech is not heard as situated expressions; it is processed as deviation from an unmarked norm.
What emerges is a form of hostile listening: not the misrecognition of a human listener, but a condition in which recognition is structurally focused. Racialized language becomes perpetually at risk–mistrusted or excluded–not because it fails to communicate but because it exceeds the parameters through which the system can register meaning. Hate here is not expressive or intentional; it is procedural, embedded in the standards that determine what can be heard as language at all.
In this sense, the problem is not that listening has been replaced. It is that it continues—without exposure, without relation, without consequence for those who perform it. What appears as neutrality is the absence of risk. What appears as efficiency is the removal of encounters. Under these conditions, harm does not need to be spoken. It is heard into being in advance—stabilized as signal, confirmed as threat, and acted upon before it can be contested. The question that remains is not whether machines can learn to listen better. It is whether we can still recognize listening once it no longer requires us at all.
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Kathryn Agnes Huether is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She earned her PhD in musicology with a minor in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota (2021) and holds a second master’s in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. She has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University and was the 2021–2022 Mandel Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Her research examines how sound mediates Holocaust memory, antisemitism, racial violence, and contemporary politics. She has published in Sound Studies and Yuval, has forthcoming work in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Music and Politics. She is a member of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s (HEFNU) Virtual Speakers Bureau and has been an invited educator at two of its regional institutes, and is current editor of ISH’s public-facing blog. Her first book, Sounding Hate: Sonic Politics in the Age of Platforms and AI, is in progress. Her second, Sounding the Holocaust in Film, is a forthcoming teaching compendium that brings together key concepts in Holocaust studies with methods from film music and sound studies.
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Series Icon designed by Alex Calovi
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Your Voice is (Not) Your Passport—Michelle Pfeifer
“Hey Google, Talk Like Issa”: Black Voiced Digital Assistants and the Reshaping of Racial Labor–Golden Owens
Beyond the Every Day: Vocal Potential in AI Mediated Communication –Amina Abbas-Nazari
Voice as Ecology: Voice Donation, Materiality, Identity–Steph Ceraso
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to follow an invisible creek: in search of a decolonial soundwalk praxis
i begin with an acknowledgement of the myriad of organizers, scholars, artists, and teachers that have shaped and continue to shape the way that i think and write. Édouard Glissant, Christina Sharpe, Lucille Clifton, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Dionne Brand, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde. it is through their profound reflections on questions of Blackness, place, belonging, earth, and love, that i have found meaning in and context for what follows.
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in the context of the rapid rise of big tech in san francisco, california, the perspective of land as perpetually exploitable is ever-present. tech-sponsored development projects are always framed by the city as being motivated by care and consideration for residents, and sometimes as being motivated by environmentalism. in reality, the displacement and destruction that results from projects like these falls primarily on poor people of color, and their homes, gardens, businesses, community spaces, and schools. similarly, large-scale development projects more often than not have devastating impacts on the land – whether it’s the land that’s being built over or the sacrifice zone elsewhere. perhaps the electric cars of san francisco are thought to represent clean energy and a healthy modern city, but the manufacturing of these cars is predicated upon extensive mining and exploitative and extractive labor outside far outside the city’s borders. and these cars drive over flattened creeks and sand dunes turned to asphalt—through gentrified neighborhoods on stolen land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, people who are still alive and fighting for sovereignty on their traditional territory, and who remain stewards of the land.
these disparities are present in the sounds of the bay area. sound, quite literally, does not exist in a vacuum. the presence of sound thus implies the presence of something outside of that sound; in every sound we hear, there is also information about the context that surrounds it. and the sounds that we do hear say something about the value of the sounds that we don’t. however, i want to argue for a soundwalking praxis that does not settle for the sounds that most easily reach the ear, as in the freeway noise or the planes passing above or the white people on the street, but that reaches beyond to listen for the negative sonic space that is always present and creating itself in the spaces between what we perceive as audible. in my understanding, this is a practice of giving life to that which capitalism/white supremacy/colonialism renders dead, a practice of centering the life that is otherwise stepped on, forgotten, discarded, silenced. listening for the ecologies of the dispossessed. for proof of life, insisting. this is a decolonial soundwalk praxis.
Allie Martin describes “decolonial soundwalk praxis” as a way of listening that disrupts and disturbs dominant western understandings of sound and space, in “Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Soundwalking as Black Feminist Method” (2019). to me, it also involves cultivating an embodied practice of centering that life which dominant pedagogies deem less than, exploitable, and extractable. in the specific geographies of the bay area, it has meant that my primary orientation while soundwalking has been to listen for the creek that runs through the land—even when the water runs dry, even when all we can see is an intersection.
the creeks i followed were mostly routed underground, culverted to run under parking lots, freeways, shopping malls, grocery stores, and other urban sites of development. the prioritizing of urban development/renewal/gentrification in the bay area over tending to the ecologies of its creeks points to the place that the land is seen to hold in so-called modern society: as a resource available to exploit as desired, as is convenient for the logistics of capitalist expansion and development. to listen in such a way, for the creek and for other forms of life forced underground and to the margins, requires methods perhaps alternative to the traditional soundwalk. we must renegotiate the categories of sound that are implied in western colonial pedagogies. we must reevaluate what constitutes a “creek sound” or a “nature sound” in the first place.
to listen for the creek when it is covered by concrete necessitates that we reach beyond thinking of a creek as something which exists in and of itself, in isolation.
∼∼∼might the sound of a creek be more than just trickling water falling through rocks? can it not be heard still in the place where it meets the ocean?∼∼∼
∼∼∼or in the rustling of the trees who drink from the same groundwater?∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼couldn’t a creek be heard in a voice that speaks of it, as in a prayer, or a promise, or a song?∼∼∼
.
if we understand space as relational, as Nigel Thrift offers in “Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography” (96), then perhaps we can reach an imagining of a creek as finding its life everywhere where water is sacred, running freely through the bodies of those that know it is there.
acknowledging the body as the point of contact between the self and the environment is an important part of a decolonial soundwalk praxis. “place is involved with embodiment” Thrift says (103), and in fact, when we truly acknowledge the body, the very boundary between the body and the environment begins to dissipate, because the body itself is constantly a part of place-making processes. if sound is a dimension through which we can understand place, then, similarly, listening for the life insisting in a place is not separate from listening for the people who are in relationship with it.
in my soundwalks, i leaned into the fact that i was experiencing every place principally through my body, and as i became more comfortable recording, i gave myself more permission to allow my experience to be subjective. what i realized is that my subjectivity, my specific presence to my body’s relationship with the places i was in, was an important orientation to be able to embody a decolonial soundwalk praxis – to be able to hear the sounds that otherwise may have been neglected.
∼∼∼while walking along lobos creek trail, for example, i noticed, growing out of the sand, plants that were familiar to me, that i had relationships with. the house finches were chirping, and my footsteps were clear∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼but the plants i recognized were not – could not be – audible to me until i spoke their names and touched their seed pods.∼∼∼
.
∼∼∼i pulled a few pods off a branch and holding them near the microphone i cracked them open, letting the seeds fall into my hands. i listened to the pods split down the middle and drop the seeds, and in their snapping i heard how much tension they were holding.∼∼∼
.
i felt how much strain it must be to make and carry all those seeds, how much release it must be to crack open and spill out of yourself, and i was grateful to bear witness. i held the seeds in my hand and some time later, i gave them to the creek. in allowing myself the trust to follow my body’s intuitive relationship with the given place, i found sounds that i otherwise would not have heard. ultimately, i found a depth of connection to and intimacy with a place that before listening to in this way, i was a stranger to.
the work of giving attention to the sounds that go unheard is necessarily an embodied exercise. it demands relationship and it demands entanglement. it demands crawling inside a mossy culvert to hear the creek talk.
curious to hear how the creek sounded differently in the tunnel, i went off the trail at piedmont park to climb inside the section where the culvert begins. with the dripping, there was a nuance to its rhythm distinct from its sounds outside of the tunnel. i was able to hear, but only by coming inside and joining the creek. we sat there together, in the dark, for a while.
it also meant sawing down a 20-foot-tall agave in order to save the seeds after the 30-something-year-old plant finally bloomed—with bright yellow flowers on branches shaped like coral—and then began to dry out and lean precariously. to keep the other plants safe, and to release some pressure from the agave, we cut its stalk and from it saved its branches, seed pods, and seeds. the pods are now hanging around the garden at the Land of Disturbance and Defiance as art.
i am principally interested in sound because i am interested in love, and when i imagine a decolonial soundwalk praxis, intimacy is surely at the center. this perspective offers a way of learning place from the position of a being who is co-creating it – not as a scientist but as a steward. a decolonial soundwalk praxis complicates traditional soundwalking’s aversion to the body. we cannot exist separate from the sonic space around us anymore than we can exist separately from the ecologies woven into our lives. to touch is to alter, and so the work here is to lean into the inevitability of connection, the impossibility of objectivity. a decolonial soundwalk praxis rejects the extraction of sound as data, pushing us instead to open our bodies/hearts/minds to receive the sounds of a place as the place is receiving us. how might we use sound to remove ourselves from the perspective of the observer? and what kind of responsibility to place does this open up? if we are a part of the places we are in and listening to, then surely we owe them reciprocity, love, conversation, patience; we must listen as we would a relative, a lover, or a friend.
i chose to record my final soundwalk at the garden on walnut and virginia street in berkeley, california, because it is a place that i know well and love dearly and i hoped to center that. the north side of the garden runs alongside strawberry creek.
rather than imposing a plan/route through the garden upon arriving, i allowed my relationship with the land to guide my movement through it. in my final mix, i layered pieces from this soundwalk together with selected excerpts from a meeting i attended with two fellow members of A.G.A.V.E., or Aspiring Gardeners Affirming Vibrant Ecologies (also Aspiring Gardeners Against Violent Extraction).in which we were trying to synthesize a manifesto using notes from previous conversations, itself a process of collective and layered creation. i chose to include portions of our conversation centered around ideas of relationship and care grounded in land, and i chose sounds from the walk that i feel hold in them intimacy and history:
∼∼∼the crows, who we feed every day and who plant seeds for us∼∼∼
∼∼∼the lock, which only those who know the land can open∼∼∼
∼∼∼and the marigolds, which we grow every year and which we harvest for offerings∼∼∼
.
these sounds are proof of relationship. small sounds that are easy enough to forget to hear, but that are important to remember – and so i try, as i would for an invisible creek.
if a decolonial soundwalk praxis is anything, it is that love is listening, and so, my promise to invisible creeks (and all quiet[ed] sounds) everywhere is to lean a little closer,
and feel your whisper on my neck,
and to listen well,
and to take notes,
and to remember,
and to conspire.
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Featured Image: “California Pepper Tree” by Flickr user baird, CC BY-SA 2.0
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ameia camielle smith (they/she) is an aspiring gardener, dancer, and writer based in the san francisco bay area (Ohlone land). they are of mixed Afro-Indian ancestry and are greatly shaped by the seeds/shells/lives that exist at the intersection of these diasporas. ameia’s work is anchored in cultural ecologies and Black feminist geographies, and they are most inspired by stories of survival and collaboration between people and plants.
ameia received their B.A in geography from the university of california berkeley in may 2024. they are currently traveling through the southern united states where they are exploring maroon swamp geographies, tracing the steps of Zora Neale Hurston, and listening to the swampy cicada sounds of their childhood in north-central florida.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Flâneuse>La caminanta–Amanda Gutierrez
Unsettling the World Soundscape Project: Soundscapes of Canada and the Politics of Self-Recognition–Mitchell Akiyama
Soundwalking on the Edges: Sound, Safety and Privilege in São Paulo, Brazil—Paola Cossermelli Messina
El Caracol: A Stroll through Space and Time in Mexico City–Anthony Rasmussen
Sonic Connections: Listening for Indigenous Landscapes in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles–Laura Sachiko Fugikawa
EPISODE 53: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”
EPISODE 47: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah–Marcella Ernest
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