Three Quick Things
Full Moon Edition March 2026
Broadcasting Underground is a new class we’ve created that looks at the arc of radio broadcasting from the Golden Age through Top 40 and on to the time of the FM Radio Revolution when the Classic Era of Rock was born. The medium was a revolutionary new technology that changed the way we experienced the world, a system that reordered our life in ways suggestive of today, as well. It was a harbinger.
Anyone who follows this newsletter knows we write a lot about the struggle between art and commerce, freedom and control, innovation and orthodoxy, conflicts that no doubt have been in play since the earliest notions of commerce took hold. We focus on music, media, and the counterculture in our modest part of human evolution because it’s exemplary of the larger questions that attend those weighty matters.
Our Freeform Radio Project (HERE) archives evidence of a remarkable period of broadcasting freedom. It’s generated a lead project we call Radio Active (HERE), a nifty logo, a pitch deck with a great video, and a proposed treatment for a four-part documentary - all of it seeking seed capital. How to advertise it, to reach those folks who made a bundle selling tires, insurance, or francising hamburger joints? Folks who might say, wow, rock ‘n’ roll, I wanna be a part of that! Is there a way to reach those anonymous potential funders other than social media? Toe in the water time.
So here we are in our imaginarium with a fistful of cool stuff to offer if only, you know, if only … and now we have a brilliant social media consultant from Nutshell Media Inc. in Los Angeles, who has launched a TikTok campaign at weareradioactive (HERE) that David Shepardson is generously underwriting and voila! Here’s her work, snippets drawn from our archive, and you can enjoy it, like it, follow it - please do - all the things in other words we think the platform’s razor sharp algorithms will activate to drive our message to a receptive audience. Among them we hope are some folks with some bucks who want to rock ‘n’ roll.
Technology, it is, oh yeah. As new and mysterious to some of us now as radio was to all of us when it arrived in 1920 and suddenly we all were connected electronically. Radio in fact was the first electronic companion, a preview of this new age with all its shiny devices coming our way. And all of them, experience teaches us, eventually pass through the same narrative arc: an initial period of promise and extraordinary innovation, artistry even, only to be refined soon enough into an ever more keenly crafted medium to sell us things. Radio, television, Internet, and now AI (HERE).
And this digital world is so all-encompassing we analog people want to find ways to embrace it, at least the better parts of what the technology offers, to be other than luddites lumbering our way through all these devices and apps like cartoon characters crawling through the desert dying of thirst. The technocrats have the water and they dole it out just enough to keep us in the game, so we might buy and buy again. One can’t help but wonder in the delirium of the ethers if the equation ever might change?
Solarpunk is an idea whose time has come (HERE). Maybe in the nick of time. Perhaps as a last chance to turn the tide of the Technocracy away from its ruthless pursuit of profit and toward a healthy, happy, balanced world in which the machine writ large, all those devices, platforms, concepts, is guided by nature. Where those systems serve people, not through addiction and manipulation, but by working with them organically toward a wholistic goal. Where wholesome and healthy isn’t deemed to be farfetched.
We began our Center for the New Northwest to focus on solutions and the systems that could provide them. Our belief is that our great problems are systemic and will never be solved without changing the system. That assumes of course that solutions are sought rather than simply paid lip service as we continue to hone the BIG system called free enterprise rapier sharp. In a post-scarcity world, we’d like to turn that aged sacred cow upside down and see what it looks like with its feet in the air.
Solarpunk imagines a world where “yoking technological development to ecological and biological principles to serve the good of the whole” is the goal. So radical, eh? Cooperative rather than competing systems. “Progress … measured by peace and sufficiency, and by technologies that strengthen communities, protect the commons, and make everyday life more durable….imagining what the world could look like if we used technology and labour to improve all lives, instead of concentrating wealth for the few.” Imagine a world, say, where TikTok was actually looking out for you. Really!