I haven't said so recently, but goddamn the telecommunications act of 1996 and all the market consolidation it enabled.
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@cmdrmoto @ajroach42 My brother was a jock and program manager from the mid-70s until the late 90s who left radio work in the great consolidation. I was fortunate to hire Uncle Ricky as a front-end web developer in the early 2000s after he ended his radio career from the same consolidation wave.
The '96 Act mostly destroyed the local and regional nature of radio. The profits for the rich don't compensate America for the loss of so much culture.
https://reelradio.ncbhp.com/collections/the-uncle-ricky-collection/
@ajroach42 heck yes. so many people are not aware of the 96 telecom act and what it wrought. horrible. the public airwaves haven't been the same.
@ajroach42 I truly believe the clock is ticking on those monopolies. Certain forces outside of their control are converging.
Toppled by their own concentration, I hope.
@ajroach42 i think toppled by how cheap communication hardware that runs free software and "just works" is getting. I don't believe in all this LoRa stuff at all. But I think that just cheap stuff that runs on the various free frequency bands is getting cheaper very fast and that we're getting closer and closer to where any random small group with not much money can get silicon from a foundry which can a very wide range of tasks with no gate keepers at all. Even if USA empire tech oligarchs were to ban all non USA empire silicon domestically(which I don't think they can actually pull off), I think so many nations outside of the silicon super powers are working to make cheap and accessible silicon that at least one of them will pull it off at a scale that breaks a huge number of tech monopolies at every layer of the technology stack.
Modi may be a fascist piece of shit, but as an old Berkeley anarchist it warms my heart to see him embracing RISC V as a national priority. India produces a million engineering degrees a year, and they're going all in on "free like freedom" silicon. And all these nation states spinning up their own sovereign Linux because no nation that runs Windows really has sovereignty--I think that's a big deal. I think this is one of the reasons the oligarchs were so hell bent on making sure Brazil went fascist in the recent election there, because a leftist government will be pushing for sovereign silicon outside of oligarch control.
But they lost. And that's going to happen in a hundred countries eventually.
I place a great deal of hope in the hardware replication economy, where "the means of production" is all just a bunch of code which can replicate entire self-contained industrial ecosystems from continent to continent.
@dirtwizard666 I feel like the proliferation of Solar and Batteries is putting us in a similar situation.
@ajroach42 my dad was a broadcaster up til the mid-1980s, so media consolidation was something i learned to worry about very early in life.
i feel like businesses have been pushing us proles through a continuous anti-progressive slide for as long as i can remember.
ironically i was going through a patriotic phase in 1996; I’d just enlisted in the air force. I remember the telecoms act of 1996 as the first time i truly regretted that choice.