Thank you, Nathan. That was such a nice introduction, and sincere thanks to the whole Medigob group for inviting me to be here today and really appreciate people taking time out of their Wednesday to care about nerd stuff, as I call it. Okay. Let me see if I can share my slides with you all. Okay. So other networks is the name that I've given to a cluster of projects that I've been working on for some years now, partly on my own and partly with Libby Streagle, who is the managing director of the media archaeology lab. You right on this opening slide, you can see there's a link to the media archaeology lab, and there's also a link to another website that Libby and I have cobbled together called othernetworks.net. All of these other networks projects are invested in documenting and sometimes even recreating networks before and or outside the Internet. So Other Networks of Radical Technologies Sourcebook is the title of a book I wrote, that's that was published by an art book publisher called Anthology Editions in May. And, unfortunately, it was sold out with preorders practically the day it came out, but they're printing another 1,500 copies that should be available in mid November. Just as a as a side note, I like to imagine an alternative universe where there's a a documentary called the making of other networks. And we learn about this plucky book project that persists against all odds, including an initial four month publication delay after the book was sent to printers in China and then didn't make it past the censors because of its mention of student activists use of facts in the late nineteen eighties to inform people in Mainland China of the Tiananmen Square massacre. And I actually got the list of terms to search for all projects that are being printed in China, which was really interesting because it also just includes maps of Asia. And then after this, there was another two month publication delay because of a once in a lifetime snowstorm in Turkey where it was later printed. And now interesting way to conclude the story. Anthology Editions is, I believe, technically out of business, and they are no longer publishing new books. So, yeah, what an interesting adventure. So, anyway, today, I'm gonna start off by talking about why other networks are so important. And I'm pretty sure I am preaching to the choir, so I hope you'll just patiently listen to me talk about it. And then I'll talk about examples of other networks. Even though I can only talk about a handful today, I I think that that it's it's the sheer volume of other networks that's also important to show how much of this history has been forgotten or brushed aside in the name of the new. So in 1972, after four years as publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand wrote a piece for Rolling Stone magazine detailing the surprising convergences he saw happening between computer science scientists at cutting edge research institutions like Stanford and Xerox PARC and the so called computer bums. I miss computer bums. Computer bums working to bring, as he put it, computers to the people. By this point, time sharing networks had been around since 1961, and members of the counterculture were well on their way to launching their celebrated grassroots community memory project in 1973, and that's what you're looking at here is an initial, like, kind of a demo of community memory. Alongside these developments, the ARPANET had also been active since 1969. Minicomputers had emerged already in the mid nineteen sixties as smaller, more affordable alternatives to mainframe computers. Microcomputers, those smaller and more affordable computer kits for hobbyists, had also begun appearing in 1971. And we were just a few years away from the advent of personal computers, prebuilt machines for home use that featured keyboards and screens. And I love talking about this with my students because to them, that is what a computer has always been and always will be as a computer with a a keyboard and screen. So it's really great to introduce them to alternative past futures of computers where, you know, for all we know, we could be playing with little devices in our pockets that work with switches and have no keys no keyboards, no screens. By the early nineteen eighties, an international power struggle was brewing over whether and how to connect this bafflingly wide array of computers and local, national, and international computer networks, which eventually resulted in the worldwide adoption of TCPIP. The transmission control protocol, Internet protocol enabled the interconnection of nearly any computer network to create the largest network of networks that we now just call the Internet. As networks gradually moved away from the domains of government regulated postal, telegraph, and telephone services and research institutions and then more towards the domain of massive international conglomerates, it started to come next to impossible to figure out where one network ended and another began, let alone where these networks were, how they worked, and how you could figure out the nature of our access to these networks. The community of community memory had largely been eclipsed by a kakistocracy of corporations. And I came across this word about a year ago, and it's just so incredibly perfect for the moment that we're living through. And if you don't already know, it means, governed by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. So at the same time as this momentous shift took place from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s, the public's collective memory of what had come before this period started to grow very blurry and ill defined, particularly in the face of these stories that are repeated over and over and over again about the Internet's invention and its status as the apex of usually American innovation. So now we're in 2025, and I'm sure I don't need to catalog for all of you the state of things, including misinformation as a daily norm along with relentless tracking, surveillance, and the monetization of every single click, scroll, or pause, all of which now seems to be in the service of end days fascism as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor put it a few months ago in a piece for The Guardian. The Internet is now the very opposite of innovation, inventiveness, and progress. Even tech entrepreneurs seem aware that we're living through a turning point. Although depending on their values and investments, their opinions vary on whether today's Internet is taking a turn for the worse or for the better. So an interesting example for me was, came about in December 2023 where the American technology executive and entrepreneur, Anil Dash, penned a piece, a game for Rolling Stone, in which he said that with the increasing popularity of the relatively new and noncommercial social media platform Mastodon, along with what he called the raucous hedonism of blue sky, which always makes me laugh because that is not my experience of blue sky. The world for him is witnessing the complexity and the multiplicity of the weirder, more open web that's flourishing today. But despite the potential pleasures offered by platforms like Mastodon and Blue Sky, how weird can they really be if they all use if they're all running basically on the same protocol, obey the same logics and exist on the same infrastructures owned by the same multinational conglomerates. Even though most major Internet platforms continue to push for the, in in Guattari's words, centralization, conformism, and oppression that Felix Guattari observed in back in 1993. I do think we're also witnessing a shift toward what Guattari also observed, in his words, miniaturized systems that create the possibility of a collective appropriation of the media. So to me, much more compelling than the small servers participating in the larger mastodon fediverse are alternative networks that range from barbed wire fence phones to zines and mail art, video phone, telex, and microbroadcast. This is just a few networks from the past that either still exist or are in the process of being revived. We also often don't know just how compelling a given network can be until we see artists in particular exploring their limits and possibilities. So to me, the time has really come to start excavating all these networks that came before, reenlivening our sense of what we would like the Internet to be. And the act of excavating, of digging down to uncover how these networks worked is key. I don't think it's enough to just swap stories about networks we might not have heard of before or to marvel at how weird, experiments undertaken with them were. In the in defiance of the culture of exclusivity and the cultivation of inaccessibility that has defined telecommunications since the advent of amateur radio back in the early twentieth century, it's really time to start demystifying how networks work and get back to laying the groundwork for anyone to try, say, attaching analog telephones to barbed wire or try picking up a soldering iron to build a super simple FM radio transmitter. Not only is another Internet possible, but we are all actually capable of building our own network. So what you're looking at here is a pamphlet that Libby and I wrote, maybe a year ago where we walk people through how to build your own mini FM transmitter that's, based on the work of the, radio artist Ketsuo Kogawa, that did these workshops in the nineteen eighties. His instructions are, it turns out, kind of difficult to follow, and a lot of the parts that he recommended, people get are no longer available. So this is for anyone who has never done anything with electronics, never picked up a soldering iron, and maybe have no sense that it was possible to build your own mini FM transmitter. You can get a PDF of the pamphlet on the othernetworks.net website. Alright. So I think the excavation of these alternative networks is also important for giving us tools to imagine how networks might be different. Based on past and present alternatives from all over the world, we need to keep working on globalizing and pluralizing histories of the Internet to empower people to reimagine the future of the Internet as the future of networks, plural. So on that note, I would like to walk us through some of the other networks I've mentioned so far, Largely because of my own investments in media archaeology and the influence of Foucault, I decided not to organize the networks in other networks by chronology. Instead, networks were organized first according to their underlying infrastructure. So I'm trying to make visible what has become invisible or just absolutely taken for granted. So there is a big section on wireless networks, which you can see is further subdivided into networks that use sound, air, water, optical, radio, and microwave. And then there is another section on wired networks, which, is further subdivided by electrical wire and barbed wire. And then as you can see, there's also a section on hybrid networks. These are networks that are both wireless and wired. And then there's a half serious, half joking section on imaginary networks. But for the sake of everyone's sanity, I'm gonna talk about these other networks chronologically today. One, postal system. The first system for delivering mail was a privately run courier system developed by ancient Egyptians for royalty. It consisted of horse drawn chariots, which would travel from the royal court to a series of relay stations and then on to the recipient. Citizens and state bureaucrats would also have to rely on people willing to deliver a letter for them while en route elsewhere. Usually, this was using horses or chariots or carriages. It's worth noting then that the use of animals for mail delivery is part and parcel of the history of postal service. While pigeons, camels, dogs, cats, donkeys, and reindeer have all been used to facilitate postal delivery, The use of horses has the longest history and is the best known example. While numerous state run oh, this is the hopefully, you can see this is a map of the very well known Pony Express that only existed for, I believe, it was, like, yeah, not very long, like, maybe six to eight months. Well, numerous state run postal services were developed since the time of ancient Egypt. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that most countries had national and international postal delivery systems in place for the delivery of letters, postcards, and parcels. By the nineteen seventies, mail delivery expanded to include electronic mail sent by way of any number of networks, thereby introducing the now ubiquitous network for the exchange of digital communication and documents known as email. The best known artist experiments with the postal system began in 1962 with artist Ray Johnson sending letters with the instruction to please add to and return to Ray Johnson, thereby inaugurating the New York Correspondence School, which eventually evolved into the international movement known as mail art. Mail artists were, in a sense, hackers. They needed to know extensive detail about packaging rules, and they needed to be able to navigate or circum circumvent postal workers themselves who had to be sometimes tricked into delivering everything from rubber stamps to envelopes, lettering, bank notes, stickers, tickets, trading cards, badges, food packaging, sometimes food, and all kinds of odd things. So it's also worth noting that the postal system, at least at this time, was an accessible and largely democratic network, and anyone with access to a mailbox and stamps could participate. Fence phones. A fence phone, also known as a barbed wire fence phone or a squirrel line, is the use of, what's called smooth wire running from a house to nearby barbed wire fencing to create an ad informal, ad hoc, cooperative, noncommercial, local telephone network. Two key developments in the eighteen nineties led to its adoption mostly by farmers, ranchers, and people living in rural areas, especially in The US and Canada, maybe Europe as well. I've had a hard time tracking down sources to confirm that. So one of the developments was the widespread availability and inexpensiveness of barbed wire in the eighteen nineties, and the second important development was the erosion of Alexander Graham Bell's patent monopoly in 1893 and '94, which led to the sudden explosion of, 80 to 90 independent telephone companies that manufacture telephone sets that could be used outside of the Bell telephone system. So these independent telephone companies recognized that it would be too expensive to build lines in rural areas, and instead, they were openly advising farm people to buy their own telephone equipment, build their own lines, and create cooperatives to bring phones to the countryside. This explosion of independent telephone companies also set into motion the independent telephone movement that was led by everyday people who were largely interested in obtaining greater community access to what had already become a basic utility. In need of a practical way to overcome social isolation and communicate emergencies, weather, crop prices, and more, ranchers and farmers began to take advantage of the growing ubiquity of both telephone sets and barbed wire fencing. So they would hook up telephones to wires strung from their homes to a nearby fence, keeping in mind that at the time, telephones had their own battery, which produced a DC current that could carry a voice signal. So turning a crank on the phone would generate an AC current to produce a ring at the end of the line. The barbed wire networks had no central exchange, no operators, no monthly bill. Instead of ringing through the exchange to a single address, every call made every phone on the system ring, which meant that soon every household had their own personal ringtone, but, of course, anyone could pick up. The fence phone lines could also be used to broadcast urgent information to everyone on the line. And, reportedly, the quality of the signal traveling across this heavy barbed wire was excellent. But weather would often cause short circuits, which people would try to fix with anything that could act as an insulator. So this would include leather straps, corn cubs, cow horns, glass bottles, lots of other things. Anecdotally, fence phones were still being used throughout the nineteen seventies in Texas. In 2014, artists Phil Peters and David Reuter installed their own barbed wire fence telephone. That's actually the name of the artwork, in a gallery in Chicago. Their installation hung telephones they found at thrift stores from a barbed wire fence they installed in the studio space, and the phones were connected to the barbed wire with just simple copper wire and alligator kit clips. And then visitors were invited to talk to each other using the fence phones. Last September, so this is September 2024, Libby and I invited them to the University of Colorado here to reinstall their fence phone and a classroom space here at the university. And this also prompted one of our community members. Oh, this is our installation. This is what it looked like. And to my surprise, when I pitched this idea to to our dean, she said, sure. And I think she was enthusiastic until she went and poked the barbed wire and realized that it really was barbed wire. Anyway, it also prompted one of our community members here to get AppleTalk working over barbed wire. And some of you might know that AppleTalk was a protocol that Apple developed in the mid eighties, specifically for Apple community computers to communicate with each other or with other devices like printers or teleprinters. Video phone. A video phone is a stand alone device that allows for two way transmission of live images over coaxial cable or telephone wires. They often but don't always include audio. The term video phone largely came into being in the nineteen eighties with the advent of affordable devices that were capable of two way transmission. And these were essentially very low resolution televisions with built in modems and cameras. One such device originally called an iconophone and later referred to as a picture phone included two way television, video telephony, and video conferencing. And so you can really easily see this as a progenitor of contemporary web conferencing platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and then now defunct Skype. In 1927, Bell Laboratories demonstrated their iconophone with a two way transmission wait. I meant this one. The two made transmission of US secretary of commerce who Herbert Hoover giving an address over telephone wire and over radio from Washington DC to New York. By 1930, AT and T demonstrated two way television. As the New York Times described this near magical event, in their words, special television booths have been developed about the same size as an ordinary telephone booth. Upon entering the booth, the person to be televised sits in a swivel chair of faces of frame in which he will see the person at the other end of the line to whom we he will speak. The face is illuminated by a mild glow of blue light, which is reflected from the face to the photoelectric cells known as radio eyes. I just love that radio eyes. When the speaker turns on the chair and faces the apparatus, he sees on the glass screen, the words iconophone, watch the space where the television image, Then this sign lifts like a magic curtain and in its place, the animated picture appears of the person at the other end of the terminal, end quote. Subsequently, live image transmission devices were installed in post offices of Berlin and Leipzig, Germany in 1936, and these were linked by coaxial cable. Interesting to note that a lot of telecommunication, I don't know, I guess you could call it invention, was was created by the Nazis. By 1938, the third Reich had extended the network to Hamburg, Nuremberg, and Munich and had made booths available to the public. Very little to no progress was made on the video phone until well after World War two. Well, AT and T reportedly promoted their trademark picture phone at the World's Fair in 1939. A complete system wasn't implemented until 1959, and then it was demonstrated at the World's Fair in New York in 1964. John Gertner describes what visitors would have experienced in his words. They would enter one of seven booths and sit before what was called a picture unit. The device was a long oval tube measuring about one foot wide and seven inches high and about a foot in-depth. Set within the oval face was a small camera and a rectangular video screen measuring four and three eighths inches by five and three quarters inches. The picture unit was cabled to a touch tone telephone handset with a line of buttons to control the screen. If you wanted to make a picture phone call at the fair, you simply pressed a button marked v for video. After that, you could either talk through the handset or through a speakerphone on the picture unit. And what you're looking at here is a photograph of a teenager who actually tried out for an opera over the video phone at the world fair. So several months after this, picture phone booths were set up in New York, Washington, DC, and Chicago. Apparently, a three minute conversation would have cost about $16, which is about a $165 in in 2025 calculated for inflation. AT and T tried to keep expanding picture phone service across The US, but they shuttered the project in 1974 after investing about $1,000,000,000. And in 2025, that's about $6,250,000,000 While similar picture phone services were launched in France, Russia, Sweden, and The UK, The emergence of digital telephone networks coupled with Japan's development in the mid nineteen seventies of what became video phones were all responsible for the worldwide popularity of the device. But now with the phasing out or even just the ending of the public switched telephone network that is mostly run by governments, and the, you know, ubiquity of the integrated services digital network, video phones are increasingly difficult to use for long distance communication. However, you can still use them, to transmit to each other. All you need to do is just connect a telephone wire from one to the other. And so the distance of the transmission is just determined by the length of the wire. So this is Livia and I entertaining ourselves during, some part of the the pandemic doing little experiments with video phone in the media archeology lab. In terms of artists experiments with video phones, in the 1984, artists Kit Galloway and Sherry Rabinowitz initiated an ambitious project called Electronic Cafe, sometimes just known as EC. EC consisted of five cafes located across Los Angeles, and each of these housed elaborate networks of telecommunication devices for members of the public to experiment with. So each one included teleconferencing equipment, audio conferencing equipment, telephones, video cameras, monitors, video printers, slow scan TV transceivers, computer conferencing services, and databases. It's really stunning. I came across in some archive a budget of the the grant money that they requested and actually did end up receiving. I think a good chunk of it came from NASA, and it was, like, several $100,000 worth of equipment. In 1987, Galloway and Rabinowitz launched Electronic Cafe International or ECI, and this was a collection of 60 nodes around the world that produced and participated in virtual events. And these events rely heavily upon video phones for the transmission of still images. They were featured in numerous ECI virtual events, including in 1991 international link ups as they called them with Timothy Leary, online meetings from children from The US, Japan, and South Africa. And there was even a video phone celebration of the American composer Pauline Oliveros, which involved 50 artists and roughly 20 sound and video technicians in six cities and three time zones. This this sort of, like, spectacle of massive global participation in our art event doesn't happen this way anymore as far as I know, anyway. In 1986, at about the same time, Van Gogh TV was formed by artists and hackers from Austria and Germany. Working primarily in interactive TV, they are probably most well known for their 1992 project Piazza Virtuali that was an extension of what had already been put on in Italy. And it was installed for one hundred days during the contemporary art exhibition called Documenta nine that took place in Kassel, Germany. The most surprising, even shocking at the time aspect of Piazza Virtuale was that with the help of picture phones along with fax, slow scan TV and satellites, visitors experience TV as an interactive medium rather than a broadcast medium. And I think to this day, that's a very foreign idea for a lot of people. This is a description of the project by a by a critic. There were no presenters, no announcements, no explanations. In fact, no show at all. Instead, you could call a telephone number that was displayed on the TV screen. And if you were lucky and got through, you were suddenly on air and could speak to the world via TV. Up to four callers found themselves in a strange random community, could chat with each other or they could give a speech to mankind. Many callers were so startled that they hung up immediately. Others managed little more than hello. Some tried to make conversation with the other callers. Others made farting noises until they were thrown off the line. Helix. I'm almost there. Thank you for paying attention, everybody. Helix, also known as telephone typewriter or teletypewriter service or TWX, can refer to the teleprinter machines, the messages, the service, or the network of teleprinters that span the globe. So this is one of many reasons why people have a hard time understanding how networks work because of, weird shifting, morphing nomenclature. Considered in its totality, however, Telex is primarily for text based communication, and it used the circuits of the public switch telephone network or sometimes private lines. The sending and receiving devices are teletypewriters or teleprinter devices, and the sending and receiving signals are derived from telegraphic signaling sorry, telegraphic signaling and that the presence or the absence of a level of electric current indicates a mark and a space. And these are either recorded on paper tape or they're automatically converted to characters. So while Telex might use the circuits of the public switch telephone network, the network itself uses a five bit digital code and a separate system of assigning Telex numbers. So I think this is why it's often conflated with the telephone number, but it is in fact separate. Telex has remained a popular communication network for nearly the last one hundred years because it is still to this day an inexpensive way to transmit legally recognized messages securely and simply. The first documented and publicly available teles network was AT and T's teletypewriter exchange service called TWX. This was launched in 1931 with 16,000 pelletite machines. Oops. After this point, still more machines were installed in companies, banks, and newspapers across the company. To make a call, the customer would look up the number in the nationwide TWX directory, and they would call an operator to be connected. And once connected, the two subscribers could type their messages and reply. So it was basically texting in the nineteen thirties. A year later in 1932, Western Union inaugurated its own Telix network that they called timed wire service, and they used, their telegraph lines for one way customer use. Given that sending a telex was cheaper and in many ways easier than placing a long distance phone call, it was quickly adopted by the press, travel agencies, airlines, governments, and embassies. And as the decades progressed, Western Union continued to develop its network, launching an automatic teleservice between New York City and 12,000 subscribers in Canada in 1958. In 1969, Western Union purchased AT and T's BWX net network, making them the de facto provider of Telix to The US until they ended the service in 02/2006. The first Telex networks in Europe were set up between Berlin and Hamburg, Germany, again, from 1933 to 1935. And at the the beginning in this early period, only about 40 private subscribers were included in the network. The German ReichsPost adopted the system in 1935, and by 1940, the German teles network had roughly 10,000 subscribers. Networks were also then set up in England in 1935, in France in 1946, Japan, 1956, and Australia, 1959. By 1970, Telex services were also available between North America and Europe and throughout most countries in the world. And at its peak in the late nineteen eighties, Helix had roughly 1,700,000 subscribers worldwide. It wasn't long, however, before it was eclipsed by the popularity of what I call, just for accuracy sake, telephaximile or facts and computer network based communications such as email. Still, the technology hasn't altogether disappeared. I've heard stories about how people in The Balkans and elsewhere still send telegrams to express condolences. You can also use the service that's called International Telegram or iTelegram to send or receive telegrams around the world. And in fact, I've received one from from my birthday last year. The company operates the former Western Union Telix network, and they claim that telegrams remain a popular way to send important messages since people using use them for canceling contracts and sending legal notifications because a time stamped copy of the messages retained in their files for seven years and can be legally verified. One of the best known instances of artists using Telex to produce and distribute art was the conceptual art collective, AnythingCo, that was founded by Ian and Ingrid Baxter in 1967 in Vancouver, Canada. Until their breakup in 1978, the pair used anything co as a way to appropriate the discourse of capitalism for artistic ends. The group also often used Telex as part of their prod projects because for them, at that time, Telex symbolized in their words corporate legitimacy. And in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, telex was a deeply ingrained means for conducting business. Anything co created numerous telex and telecopier works between 1968 and 1970, most of which depict triangle shaped networks of nodes across maps of Canada and The US. And while the Telexes themselves also inscribe these shapes as they were transmitted from place to place In I think this is another example. In 1970, Joan Lowndes wrote in the Vancouver Sun that anything co are concerned at the degree to which we are US dominated and believe that communications represents a field in which we can win international prominence. In other words, their appropriation of the telex was also an intervention in the Canadian media communications landscape, which was and still is dominated by content from The US. For the duo of anything co, the most powerful affordance of the Telex was the fact that, in their words, it's an open channel. No one can stop the Telex from working because it's a twenty four hour a day communication hookup. As soon as you dial the number, you're really into that office. So this quality was revolutionary for 1970, many decades before Internet access became affordable and accessible. At the same time, as AnythingCo was performing these experiments with Telex, the Chilean project project CyberSign was being created, and it lasted from 1971 to 1973. Salvador Allende's popular unity government brought in British cyberneticist, Stafford Beer, to propose, in his words, a real time control system capable of collecting economic data throughout the nation, transmitting it to the government, and combining it in ways that could assist government decision making. So something that I've come to understand since I wrote that is that Stafford Beer did not have a top down notion of of control or organization. He was imagining project CyberScience as very much like a distributed system that had a, like, a a horizontal control structure. When Bir arrived in Chile in 1971, there were only 50 computers in the entire country. And so he proposed that they use the more than 400 Telex machines that he discovered in storage from a previous government regime. And he decided to install them on factory floors to communicate production data to the Telex machine in the National Computer Corporation of Santiago. And at that point, programmers would translate the Telex data into punch cards, which were then fed to the IBM three sixty slash 50 mainframe computer. The system played a key role in the events of October 1972 when 40,000 truck drivers went on a month long strike and the government used the Telex machines to organize alternative transportation. So I'm always amused to find that, like, yeah, the government completely just, like, supported the strike. I was just interested in using project CyberSign to find alternative means of of transportation. Beer believed that during the strike, roughly 2,000 messages were transmitted a day over the network. And Project Cybersign, as you probably already know, came to an end with the military coup and Allende's death on 09/11/1973. Alright. Last network. This is this QR code actually just goes directly to the the mini FM transmitter pamphlet. I thought I had a picture of Tetsuya Kagawa, but it looks like I don't, or do I? Nope. I do not. Give me one second. I've lost my mouse. I seem to have lost the ability to share, so, hopefully, you've grabbed the the QR code or you can just find it on the other networks.net site. So micro broadcasting, it is often used interchangeably with the terms micro radio, mini FM, and sometimes even free radio. So these are all a collection of practices involving the use of a low power transmitter over a limited distance reaching a limited number of people. It's also considered a type of community media because of its local and noncommercial nature. So given the low power and short distances involved, microbroadcasting can be both unlicensed and legal. However, regulations determining the legal status and power of microbroadcasting vary a lot over time and from country to country. So as the as dudes online are very fond of warning me, if national regulatory bodies prohibit individuals from transmitting to their local community, micro broadcasting can turn into pirate radio. So as Tetsuya Kagawa writes in a micro radio manifesto, micro means diverse, multiple, and polymorphous. If micro does not mean small and physical size, then even physically bigger radio stations could become micro. He continues, micro radio is an alternative to mass, medium, and global communications that could cover the globe with qualitatively the same pattern information. Based in Bologna, Italy and lasting from 1976 to 1981, the unlicensed radio station Radio LICI could be seen as the first instance of microbroadcasting. Even though the founders referred to it as free radio, and technically at the time, it was probably pirate radio, It predated the emergence of the term micro broadcasting, and the group envisioned Radio Aliche as a conscious micro radio experiment that tried to distribute control of the airwaves across many small transmitters. And what they were trying to do is flatten hierarchies between sender and receiver, embrace localism, and use art to unsettle, if not unseat capitalism. As the editors of the Toronto based magazine, The Red Menace, put it in 1978, Radio Aliche broadcast news of the event as they occurred often by airing telephone calls from militants who described events, called for assistance in a given sector and reported police movements. The station was twice rated and closed down by police, but they resumed broadcasting by switching locations and resorting to a transmitter powered by car batteries. This is a tactic that people use today. Somebody was doing that very thing in the Boulder and Denver area just this past year. A few years later in the early nineteen eighties, Tetsuo Kogao introduced free radio to Japan calling it mini FM as he led the way to him building these tiny FM transmitters that used less than a 100 milliwatts and they only had a half mile radius. The term micro radio or micro broadcasting then emerged in The US in 1983 in the wake of the police beating of African American Duane Reidis and a public housing development in Springfield, Illinois. Reidis, who changed his name to Mbana Kantakou, first created the tenants rights association or TRA. And to make sure that the TRA could reach as many residents of the development as possible, he created radio station WTRA using a one watt transmitter, and he broadcast from his living room. In 1988, WTRA became Zoom Black Magic Liberation Radio, then Black Liberation Radio, followed by Human Rights Radio, which I believe is still broadcasting today. Okay. On that note, I'm going to end just by saying that while this excavation of alternative networks is important for the sake of a full historical record, I think it's also essential for giving us tools to imagine how networks could be different. These other networks allow us to ask what if questions and to move away from prognosticating about the future of the Internet to imagining a future that is instead full of networks. Thank you so much everyone for listening. I'm sorry that went longer than I

Did you say I just wanna make sure I understood the question really, sir. You said in terms of Internet connectivity. Did you say that?

Yeah. No. No. It's a nice question. I mean, I don't I don't think my my answer is terribly earth shattering, but I think, you know, from what I see with with young people, what has mostly been lost is the sense that we actually have the power to build our own networks, that we do not need to just, like, give over our power to, major multinational conglomerates or or corporations. And as an example of that, the fact that so many of us have no sense of how radio works, no sense that we actually that that radio waves are a natural resource that all of us have access to and that they're within our power to use to communicate has yeah. That's something really important that has been lost along with, I'll just end by saying, a a sense of how valuable small limited local networks are that maybe we are at a point where we don't need to be able to communicate instantly with all people everywhere. Yeah.

Thank you. Thanks, Rob, for listening. I'm so sorry we didn't have time for more discussion, but you can email me anytime.

That's started a thread for discussions in the Medigob Slack. If folks wanna share, I can bring some questions over from the chat into the meta gov Slack, and we can continue there as well. Thank you so much, Laurie, for being here, for presenting, and thanks everyone for coming.

Thanks, everyone. Bye.