Notices by DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab (djsundog@toot-lab.reclaim.technology), page 4

like something? share it with your friends. not supposed to? who says? who cares? share it with your friends anyway.

hate something? do not share it with your friends. not to mock it. not to shame it. just don't share it. it's way simpler and is more effective at making the thing you hate not a thing as much.

all of this, everything we deal with, is about people interacting with people, sometimes by choice, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes under threat of violence. you're your best advocate in deciding how your side of that interaction is going to go, not the person on the other side.

it used to be a scene on the internet where if an institution or group of institutions, say e-commerce sites, started doing something users hated, say requiring an account to browse and see prices, the users responded by building something to make the hated functionality go away, like a database filled with throwaway accounts for websites requiring accounts.

it still is a scene. bypass shit. share the bypasses. push back en masse. constantly.

goodbye stranger
it's been rude
don't fry chicken
in the nude

the decimation of locally-produced broadcast radio continues apace

https://www.timesunion.com/business/article/local-iheart-radio-stations-layoff-hosts-company-19909869.php

gonna end up with nothing but three bash scripts being run by three corporate juggernauts all churning out jack fm playlists from coast to coast. the worst.

iHeartRadio is a monster. they own over 40% of the stations owned by the ten biggest broadcast groups in the us (as of 2021, based on data from https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/programming-and-sales/who-are-the-top-earning-u-s-radio-groups )

their dream for the broadcast radio landscape is five super-popular personalities piped into algorithmically-generated playlists optimized to make you hear and respond to as many ads as possible.

this huge chunk of the commons, put under the forced stewardship of the government who decided to regulate it, turned over to the resource extraction class to absolutely suck it dry and make it valueless.

these airwaves - this system for disseminating information and entertainment - it's a shared resource.

it's been stolen from all of us by deregulation and corporate capture.

you deserve better. your communities deserve better. we all do.

pisses me the fuck off.

and it doesn't have to be like this!

iHeartRadio didn't even exist twenty years ago!

this is relatively recent damage, but it's been so thorough that it might as well have been generations ago. the local station facilities and equipment has long been disassembled and parted out and sold for scrap. the staff found other fields in which to work, leaving broadcast radio as a thing they used to do, back when.

even iHeartRadio's originator, Clear Channel Communications, didn't start out as an awful outsized force - that didn't happen until deregulation started rolling through the federal government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHeartMedia

deregulation and private equity, every fucking time.

The corporate capture of the airwaves might seem like a third-rate issue to be all hot and bothered about, particularly if you don't remember what the broadcast environment was like in the 1970s and the 1980s (and earlier, I assume, but I have no personal reference for).

having people from your local community be the ones who are broadcasting news and entertainment for your community is a big deal! it's representation and it's focused on the needs of your community. it's not a platform for ad sales, it's a communications channel, a commonality, a way to bring people together.

the broadcast realm is as much a third place voidspace as this fediverse of ours is, but it's been entirely contained by the oligarchs whomst hoard. a big part of me thinks if we could reclaim that voidspace again we'd be well on our way to fixing a lot of what's fucked, but I lean towards that space and am definitely biased. but, consider the possibilities...

frankly this is why there's a strong culture of encouraging folk to post a tagged introduction post when joining many many fediverse servers, to both, well, introduce someone to their neighborhood but also to create opportunity for folk to recommend connections they see between the new person and their own network of connections.

no software was implemented to support this; it's people powered, like the best bits of the networks you've most enjoyed over the years.

see also hashtags, follow fridays, fediblock, mosstodon, etc etc etc.

lean into people-power.

"bluesky has starter packs. ergo, the fediverse needs starter packs."

we had the means for decentralized account recommendation in mastodon years and years ago. you could feature other accounts on your profile. like a blog roll.

of course, I think it's been completely eliminated from the actual profile page anymore.

and we've had folks - curators - maintaining a few different directories of folk who wanted to be found associated with the topics they wanted to be found under for many many years as well.

fuck if I understand why we feel compelled to chase someone else's marketingspeak at every opportunity.

@slothrop probably frowned upon but I am not a cop so if someone has access to one I ain't gonna stop em

putting together a group of folks in your area to design and build a surface-to-air trebuchet accurate enough to hit billionaires' private planes is both community building and climate catastrophe mitigation so you get a twofer in the good feels department. just a suggestion.

if you want to you can leave your phone and all its sensors at home and just go out without it for a bit. that's a thing you can do if you want. it's nice.

also wanna point out that if you're in a country with a private copying levy and not making and distributing mix tapes and/or mix CDs you're just throwing money away since you've got laws making you pre-pay the fine for maybe infringing. fuck it, get your money's worth, I say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

distinctly remember calling radio DJs to make requests to get specific songs for the next song on a mixtape I was making somebody but I didn't have the song yet lol

and so very often they'd do it and play the song and the coolest would even let there be a little air at each end and not do their normal crossfades and voiceovers and you knew that was a cool ass DJ working the late night shift at the local FM station, to be that thoughtful for a 12-year old who called up to hear "Sunglasses at Night" like a total dork.

malicious compliance is a concept that can be applied to many different parts of your interaction with the rest of existence and it most certainly should be a tool you consider using when interacting with large institutions with whomst you have an adversarial relationship, whether the institutions in question know your relationship is adversarial or not. it's neat.

swordfishtrombones.

mix tapes (and the follow-on mix CDs that became popular with folk once CD-R media got cheap and CD-R drives got ubiquitous) were artifacts of a beautiful culture of citizen curators, rarely paid directly for their (usually statutorily prohibited!) curation, yet creating an entire market for (also illicit) distribution and marketing folk that definitely can be tracked to increased record sales for the artists included on the mixes.

I think about things like this pretty often and yet still not often enough.

capitalism ruins everything around me, and it has ever been thus.