TCP AM
tcp-am is a technology that began emerging in the 2040s as a radical lofi, decentralised alternative to an increasingly surveiled and goverment owned internet. by this time, the traditional AM broadcast bands, long wave, medium wave and short wave alike were all sitting disused across pretty much the whole globe. A scant few stations clung on, some even do to this day, mostly those of the Radio Free Asia variety: e.g. long range propaganda channels. But, in practice, by the dawn of the 2040s, the AM band was quiet. Due to the long range nature of broadcasts in these frequencies, it was difficult to coordinate any international efforts to realocate them for other uses. It was one of those issues that no one wanted to blink first on, so no one did.
After a decade of political upheaval and real world violence fueled by online misinformation, the digitization of work and runaway auto-generated slop flooding every corner of the net, many believed that the long-prophecized Dead Internet had come. Nerds were out of work left right and centre, many despondent at the affront to god they had spent the past half-century building. Regular folks were starting to disengage from the online sphere entirely, phones that only came with messaging apps and nothing else were becoming a trend amongst the veterans of the digital cold war. With these factors combined, a perfect storm emerged for the emergence of tcp-am - a technology first for Big Nerds, then for Slightly Smaller Nerds, that promised to bring back what was good about the web when it began. Using the disused AM frequnecies, modern compression techniques and $5 software defined radio chips from china, the Big Nerds began building a mesh network of AM radio trancievers that were capable of carrying data back and forth between nodes at a best-case rate of 3mbit in the shortwave range , dropping off to around 0.5mbit in the long wave range. And these nodes could be quite far apart! It only took a handful of people transmitting from decent backyard antenas attached to cheap home servers to make a wealth of home spun information, simple instant messaging and chat available to whole metropoliton areas, should they have a tranceiver capable of tuning in.
At first, these trancievers you could access tcp-am with were nerdy project builds, the sort of thing you’d need to know what an Arduino was to build. But in time, the advantages of this home-spun, grassroots internet became appealing to a public tired of a life defined by the whims of conglomerates. And what followed was a flood of cheap, accessible, Chinese made devices that could be used to browse this hip new, lawless, underground internet. These devices for browsing it were so low powered they could last for weeks on a single charge, and could increasingly pick up signal anywhere. This new net, with its limited bandwidth, aimed to re-create what was great about the net when it first began. Colourful home-made websites in many vibrant , clashing sahdes. Simple chat services. No centralised owners, simple home made infrastructure and a little too weird to draw too much commercial interest. Too slow to be taken over by short form video, difficult to reliably DDoS by design. OK Reader, I know what you’re thinking, this could have turned into fascist hellscape real quick, but the founder effect was strong in this one. Its earliest provisioners and inventers were aggressively genderweird discord kitten types, and the earliest communities were aggressively and openly queer nerds with more pronouns than you could shake a stick at. as your chill heterosexual friend and ally, i salute them. Remember when they were calling us wokernet? lol. A vibrant scene for sharing small games, tiny but impressive websites (like this one!), and oldshool flamewars developed amongst its bohemian, nerdy userbase, and it has remained popular ever since.
I got involved in the scene when I was following around Hellborn on their Tour-Of-Nowhere in 2041. I was 22 and living in my van at the time, and all of the gigs were held in purpsefully remote areas with no normal signal. before i left i bought one of those £50 devices off of ali express with the last of my final paycheck from my shit job at tesco and in my downtime, lying in the back of my van at 5am with bass drums thudding along in the background, i discovered this wacky world of weird websites and “domain names” and other such historical jargon. i was only a small n nerd back in those days, but that was all i needed to be to figure out how to start putting stuff on it, and decided to start “blogging” about my experiences following the tour, posting lofi bootleg recordings of the shows i was intending, even some interviews with damien and kit. I showed them what it was, and they loved the idea and what i was doing. I don’t know how many people read my blogging because I’d not figured out how to put a counter on it yet, but I don’t think thats the point of this medium. Over time, I figured out how to count my viewers and realised that this site was pretty popular, so that was nice. You can still find the old blog on the archive menu, and you can still find the recodings at the bottom of the “tape bin” page.
Cheers, ally —