MIDI, radio, and various other tools of audio culture were created by a world busy segmenting itself into nations, and they continue to exist within one that never stopped segmenting. furthermore, both have been used as tools of nation-building, of creating mass media out of which to build a shared community identity, establish physical and metaphorical borders, and, in many cases, lead people to war.

they have also both been used against these purposes, but, as with most things that came about during our world's still-standing nationalist period, their use outside of the furtherance of nationalism and the nation-state has been fraught with co-optation and disruption.