The loudspeaker is the most honest technology ever invented. It does not edit. It does not interpret. It does not decide what is important. It takes whatever comes in and makes it louder. That is all it does. The loudspeaker is the tool of the state and the tool of the revolution and nobody can tell the difference by the volume.

Hitler used loudspeakers at Nuremberg. Massive speakers mounted on poles so a hundred thousand people could hear one man's voice at the same time. Albert Speer designed the rally and the loudspeakers were part of the architecture. The voice came from everywhere. The voice was the building. The loudspeaker turned one man into the sky and a hundred thousand people looked up. That is what a loudspeaker does. It makes one voice bigger than any human voice is supposed to be.

Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August twenty-eight nineteen sixty-three and spoke into a microphone connected to a loudspeaker system that carried his voice to two hundred and fifty thousand people standing on the National Mall. I have a dream. The loudspeaker did not write those words. The loudspeaker did not believe those words. The loudspeaker carried those words across the grass and the water and the monuments and into the ears of a quarter million people who were standing in the heat because they believed the words before they heard them. The loudspeaker just made sure everybody heard.

Fela Kuti built a compound in Lagos called the Kalakuta Republic and he pointed his loudspeakers at the military barracks across the road. He played music at the soldiers. He played protest songs at the army. The army sent a thousand soldiers to burn down his compound in nineteen seventy-seven. They threw his mother out of a window. They beat the musicians. They burned the studio. But they could not burn the sound that had already left the loudspeaker. The sound was in the air. The sound was in the soldiers who heard it whether they wanted to or not.

I used a loudspeaker at rallies in Ann Arbor and Detroit and Chicago and everywhere the movement went. The bullhorn. The megaphone. The cheapest loudspeaker you can buy. You hold it in your hand and your voice becomes a weapon and the weapon does not kill anybody it just makes them hear you. The police had loudspeakers too. They used them to say disperse. We used them to say we are not dispersing. The same technology. The same volume. The only difference was the words.

The loudspeaker does not care what it amplifies. That is the lesson. The loudspeaker will carry a lie as far as it carries the truth. The loudspeaker will carry hate as loud as it carries love. The technology is neutral. The mouth is not. Every loudspeaker in the world is waiting for somebody to stand behind it and say something worth making louder. The question is not how loud can you be. The question is what are you saying that deserves to be heard by everybody in the room.