5 ms·

The article is about audio cassettes in Egypt and how Sadat banned them. (after a cursory glance-through) The headline is misleading. I thought I was in for re

• xnorswap 4y ago
  Uhm, A headline isn't misleading just because you assumed it was about something completely different, especially when there's a subheader to explain the article and a large picture of the subject matter.
  • woolion 4y ago
    > A sentence is not misleading because a chunk of people understand something totally different than what it is supposed to be about To read the subheader you have to go the site; since trying to do so hung up Firefox, it's not going to happen anymore. It will be added to my filter of bad sources along with Nautilus, the New Yorker, etc.
    • leephillips 4y ago
      That’s a shame, because Lapham’s Quarterly and the New Yorker often host interesting material. Perhaps there’s something wrong with your browser or system?
• tokai 4y ago
  Its literally about working class Egyptians getting easier access to music production and consumption because of cassette tapes. Had it been about Ableton it would really have been misleading as it would have had nothing to do with class tensions and control over cultural activity.
  • dylan604 4y ago
    Has the headline changed? Currently, the headline is "Seizing the Means of Audio Production". There is no class tensions suggested by the title. Ableton is audio production software, so it's easy to understand the first thoughts going in this direction. Mine did too, though not specific to any one software package. I even imagined "Seizing the Means" to be about some novel way of averaging signals to produce new signals. Not one thought about antiquated audio distribution formats ever popped into my thoughts from the title. Why one would think reading of the actual article would be required is a wholly other topic on the interpretation of an articles title upon first reading of the title alone.
    • ranko 4y ago
      "Seizing the Means of Production" is a reference to Marx, who had many things to say about class tension, such as "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".
      • jhpaul 4y ago
        Not only is the title a deliberate Marx reference, the article itself is about an elitist government banning lower-class entertainment. "This title is misleading because this article is about something I don't understand. I assumed that since the source was a literary magazine, this must have been about radical open source software, which has nothing to do with class tensions."
    • tokai 4y ago
      The Marx quote is "Therefore, for working people to be free, they must seize control of the means of production." Marx is explicit about a class here, the working class, and implicit about who it should be seized from. His full oeuvre is not implicit though and is quite clear that it is the capitalist class it should be seized from. The term seizing the means of production has for 150 years been widely understood as a call or reference to class struggle. Missing the framing of class in the title is a misreading.
      • dylan604 4y ago