s11e30: Pirate Radio
0.0 Context setting
It’s Monday, April 11 2022 in Portland Oregon and the National Weather Service reported the first measurable snow at PDX in April since 1940.
We knew about this because my alarm clock went off earlier than usual by running around and yelling SNOW! SNOW SNOW SNOW!
Yesterday, while running out to the store to pick up a few things to make Egg and Bacon Breakfast Bagels, now a Sunday family tradition, the Severance main titles started auto-playing in the car while I was autopilot-driving. It was mildly disconcerting.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that I’ve hit episode 30 of this season and now there’s a thought stuck at the back of my mind of “how long is this season supposed to last, anyway?” Fortunately, Robin Sloan has advice I should probably listen to.
A quick reminder: Things That Caught My Attention, Volume 1 collecting the 50 best essays from episodes 1-50 is out now. You, my three thousand-odd subscribers, can get a copy with 20% off.
Paid supporters and subscribers get a free copy, so imagine a great upsell here to become a paid supporter/subscriber.
1.0 Some things that caught my attention
Pirate radio
For some reason, I have pirate radio still stuck in my head and yesterday was wondering what the digital platform equivalents of pirate radio would be right now. I should point out that I do these things (what if x but y) not to figure out the exact translation – as you’ll see, there are a bunch of places where an analogy/metaphor breaks down – but instead to spot things that I might otherwise not see.
First thing: what do I mean by pirate radio? I’m mainly working from my direct experience, which was that there were some people in the year above me at school who ran a legit pirate radio station and let me tell you it was weird. I mean, it was exceedingly cool. People phoned in. They played music. It was hyperlocal. It was illegal, and there was a whole bunch of talk about getting raided. It was also done by a bunch of people who were doing A-Level Physics, so go figure.
So. Hyperlocal. Transgressive. Content that otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to be played. Playing to a small, in-the-know audience. Audience feedback. Expensive?
Well, not quite the same as defacing a site, then, it doesn’t feel like. And not quite the same thing as a Max Headroom-style signal hijacking, because if I assume right, broadcast TV hijacking would be way more difficult to do and much less common. I mean, did you ever listen to a pirate radio station, and did you ever know someone who ran one? Did you ever call in?
So maybe there’s got to be something about using space (pirate radio: regulated frequencies) when you’re not supposed to be using them. Maybe pirate radio is a bit like SEO then? But SEO isn’t necessarily community building (if it is, it’s fake community building). So maybe it’s like blog spam instead? But again, blog spam isn’t community building either.
A few comments when I was wondering-out-loud honed in on pirate radio being innately local due to the nature of physics, which excited my “hear the word broadcast” set of neurons and had me think of BGP hijacking and man-in-the-middle attacks, the latter because they’re “local” for the internet in the sense that they’re local to “things they’re in the middle of”. There’s still a pseudo “local” aspect of “how many network hops does this affect”, or “how many firewalls or whatever does this pass through” before becoming attenuated.
So there’s the avenue of graph-localized but not geographically localized outbreaks of “pirate behavior”, then I remembered there’s also the regular avenue of “pirate behavior over local digital networks”, which is your usual ‘toothing or AirDrop spam, both of which rely on local, short-range wireless broadcasting. So we’re back to the radio spectrum!
The other thing that’s nice about AirDrop spam is that according to boomer publication The Atlantic, it’s a thing Teens Do, which I suppose totally reinforces my pirate radio neurons in being “teens using technology in a way to be teens and pissing off people who aren’t teens”.
If I wanted to go further than that, though, then there’s the more malicious-ish version of pirate radio that might align with stingray IMSI-catchers, where again you’ve got localized messing with regulated EM spectrum and if you do it, you’re going to piss off the kind of people who can put you in jail. I am not aware of that many teenagers doing IMSI-catching. Yet. But I expect Cory Doctorow might.
But, anyway. Last time I thought about pirate radio there was the whole “kids don’t need to do it anymore because broadcasting is so easy to do on the internet now” which in a way kind of makes Twitch streaming and Facebook Live streaming and so on boring because The Sand Hill Road wants you to do them. So then my brain jumps to “what if script kiddies and pirate radio”, and from there to node.js supply chain type attacks, injected crypto-mining javascript and so on, but… there’s still not really two-way communication there.
… and I just remembered, this was the 90s. The thing about pirate radio, as well, was that it was time-bound and ephemeral. You could record it, but that wasn’t really the point, and recording back then meant “grabbing a cassette tape”. It was kind of appointment-to-listen, because at least in my experience they weren’t broadcasting all the time (I mean, we were in school! We weren’t that transgressive) so you knew it would be on whatever evening after, uh, tea-time.
I’m not really sure how far I got on this, other than a sense that there might still be something there, and that perhaps the infrastructure of the internet and the way people come together on it doesn’t quite support pirate-radio-type-things yet. Maybe it’s just comment brigading/mobbing? (Actually, that’s probably right?) Maybe it’s a combination of platforms and behaviors? (Actually, that’s probably definitely right). You’ve got new coordination platforms, new meeting platforms: so you can even figure out what you’re going to do in the semi-public on whatever subreddit or messageboard, but now instead of just the EM spectrum to be a pirate on, you have… well, all of the IP packets. Now that seems a lot more interesting.
Grab bag
- Light painting with pixel art is beautiful. Caught my attention because: well, it’s beautiful.
- A new Twitter find is the Management Games Aesthetics account at @MgmtGAesthetic, which pairs well with a foreword to SimCity 2000: Strategies and Secrets, Special Edition, where Will Wright talks about how sick he is of SimCity. Caught my attention because: game design, interface design, art direction, a bunch of retro/90s nostalgia gaming.
- A random connection in my head going from “shopping mall” to “web portal”, the latter both in the sense of the late 90s fad and its lingering influence on software/technology in modernization projects, where I’ve seen portals consistently mentioned in the upgrading of “legacy tech”. Caught my attention because: making weak connections between concepts is how my brain discovers new things/insights, so what is it about shopping malls that we could learn from, and from there, the hop skip and jump to “if a shopping mall is a portal, what’s an outlet mall?”
- Tiffany Chu posted pictures of dinner topic conversations at an event on digital urbanization that looked interesting, including The Failure of Smart Cities, The Un-Smart City and A New Technological Future. Caught my attention because: duh.
- Via Pavel A. Samsonov, a prototyped tool for showing WCAG recommendation-compliant contrast of colour against black and white text and contrast in general for arbitrary colors (just click through). Caught my attention because: Pavel’s comment of “make tools that make doing the right thing easier” is an excellent prompt, and how there’s always opportunity even for something like “a color picker”.
Okay, that’s it for the day. The snow is still here. The kids have already been outside and thrown snowballs at each other.
How was your weekend?
Best,
Dan