The First Social Network: In rural Argentina residents send messages w AM radio
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
In the 70s and 80s (and probably before) in the UK, the BBC used to broadcast occasional "sos messages" [1] prior to the main daily news summaries on FM radio - for people who were away from home and, for whatever reason, uncontactable. They usually related to a relative being dangerously ill. I remember hearing them on my parent's car radio on summer camping trips.
Obviously the uk is a small and quite densely populated island but, without two way personal communications, some needs were similar to those described in the article. It changed a lot of things.
[1] https://swling.com/blog/2012/09/radio-4-and-now-an-urgent-so...
I am unable to find an online resource with more info, though I know from general reading and from visiting WW2-era museum ships that sailors were listening to radio shows while at sea. I assume it was all shortwave, back in the time when radio dials included city names.
https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-american-renaissance-and-...
Also some programs in California: UCSC, CSU East Bay, Santa Monica College, and Orange Coast College in Honors Lit.
It feels very wasteful of a scarce resource to leave this spectrum abandoned, especially when it has interesting properties.
if anyone could broadcast to so many so easily, that is considered dangerous nowadays. if there is no one there to receive (no one remembers AM, no AM receivers), you can still broadcast but no one will listen.
As for "small island" - I was trying to make a point about the size of the uk on a global scale, and compared to vast places like the Argentinian campo. But perhaps "island group" or "archipelago" would have been a better choice.
When you get to the Hebrides and Northern Isles, the scales are still pretty big. Most people don't realise that Shetland, for example, is a hundred miles from end to end (including Fair Isle).
It's also the best part of a hundred miles from Inverness to John O' Groats, and the road is bad beyond Easter Ross. Unlike the Faroe Islands, there has been little attempt to create tunnels... Just small bridges and causeways.
The smaller islands can get cut off in storms and power cuts come happen.
Knoydart and Moidart only used to be reachable by boat, despite being on the mainland. (You can walk but it's not easy.) They were so remote that the Protestant Reformation never reached them.
Even in the south west you have to factor in distance. For example, Campbelltown looks close to Glasgow on the map but takes at least three or four hours by bus. Tarbert to Campbelltown is thirty miles. The Isle of Jura to the west takes a long time to get to, unless you have a helicopter. (A shout to Galloway which is as far south as you can get in Scotland, and gets further south than Newcastle upon Tyne, but still has awful roads in many places.)
Places like Moidart, Knoydart, Kintyre, Glenelg, and even Cowal and Caithness function a bit like islands despite being on the mainland. Deliveries and utilities are horrible in these areas and they are being discriminated against by private delivery etc (the Royal Mail when it functioned better was a blessing to them.)
Of course there are parts of major continents which are much more remote, but these are bad enough. I've spent time in Australia where distances are incredible. Even Tasmania which looks small on the map is slightly smaller than Ireland.
Its a long way from even Cornwall to the North of Scotland, and significantly further between the islands.
Indeed, driving from Land’s End to John o’Groats is basically the same distance as the longest drive across Texas!
41 is not the same order of magnitude as 2.6.
In conclusion, from the perspective of the people this article is about, the UK is very small and densely populated.
More yonder https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...
With a little investment, I think Meshtastic/Reticulum could do wonders for communities like this. With Argentina being largely flat, even putting up a relatively short mast on the roof of a house should give it a good enough range (~10-30km).
https://www.rhizomatica.org/what-we-do/
Lightweight HF rigs and the Hermes Mercury digital modem:
California is roughly 1/10th the size & 10x the population density, with what is likely the largest meshtastic network in the world and that isn't able to span more than about 1/5th of the state (without even getting into reliability or lack thereof).
KPFT's version is a little more specialized. It's called The Prison Show and transmits messages from families to their loved ones behind bars.
When I'm in Houston, I try to listen because it gives you a taste of a segment of life and people you may otherwise never come in contact with. If you're interested in human nature and the power of communication, it's very engaging.
The last time I heard it, it was on in the evening, I think on a weekend.
Can confirm that this is, effectively, a staple of normal life around there. Calling it "the first social network" made me chuckle.
Younger generations might not be aware of this mostly due to reduced AM radio audiences, but my daughters (3x ~30 yo) do know what this is about.
Through the efforts of many (and yet still few) we have created such amazing technologies. And yet so many are still so poor and without the benefits of modern technology because we've allowed a system (capitalism) to be created where wealth and access to technology accumulates up top and no, it does not really "trickle down".
To me, it really is the saddest thing about human existence and entirely predictable because of how most of our human behaviours are linked to evolutionary processes.
It's nice to romanticise human emotion and connection in a rugged environment using technology that we consider defunct and for them to be able to live a life that many would consider "more natural". But then one of them gets sick. Someone who loves, is loved, who creates art and consumes art, who smiles when the petrichor hits their nostrils after a dry Summer. And then they die.
I just really wish that things were more equitable because we definitely have enough to go around.
Giving people material goods or technology does make them wealthy. Sometimes it even hurts them https://humanprogress.org/agricultural-subsidies-in-wealthy-... You have to understand poverty and what causes it before you are able to solve for it. Your colonial / dependency mindset will not help.
The system just decides where the wealth goes.
Under capitalism, it doesn't go to the people who did the labour.
Automation is removing the human labour factor rapidly, so that no longer holds true. Karl Marx's writings never anticipated cybernetics, transhumanism and genetic engineering despite his followers believing he was some kind of infallible prophet.
The machines will build themselves, repair themselves and run themselves.
Indeed this is the main question of Marx's work.
His ideas are built around an industrial working class, which may vanish completely as an economic unit within the next few decades. In previous eras, there was a need for the rulong class to have a market and a human workforce.
UBI sounds great on paper, but you have to be in with whoever or whatever is doling it, and it hands them power over you.
There are hundreds of thousands of similar stories but the origin of the blue LED, something responsible for a large number of child technologies, came from an engineer who basically disobeyed his boss, worked himself down to the bone on the problem including spending many of his own hours.
And when he finally did it, he got absolutely shafted; none of those huge profits for him, barely a thank you.
Capitalism barely provides. It's too concerned with optimising for profit. Any technologies developed are usually an accident/the product of hard work that capitalism has not fully paid for. Research grants are the only true way to do it.
And if capitalism hadn't created a corrupt system where those who are wealthiest barely pay in on tax, then we wouldn't need them in the first place. People could crowd source developing new technologies because they'd actually be getting their fair share, or the government can do it through grant allocation.
Before we even discuss capitalism, Argentina's history shows that a large share of its GDP has gone directly to corruption at every level of the pyramid. See [1].
[1] "Corruption accounting and growth: towards a new methodology" <https://ideas.repec.org/a/eme/jfcpps/jfc-04-2019-0039.html>
We can't help but not play fair. It's wired into us.
Capitalist countries like Taiwan, South Korea, and the People's Republic of China (!) have gone from being much poorer than we are to being much richer than we are in only a few decades. Meanwhile Perón's "third way" between capitalism and communism has left us poor and economically stagnant. We have to constantly struggle against bureaucracy to do anything economically productive, and if that's successful, the government confiscates it. Only politically well-connected companies can prosper, and those mostly produce low-quality goods that people only buy because importing goods from abroad is prohibitively expensive and bureaucratic. The society is thoroughly corrupt, having internalized the lesson that when someone gets cheated, it's their own fault for being so stupid, and a laudable achievement for the cheater. So Argentines who have the choice invest their money abroad, leaving the country without the capital investment required for industrial productivity.
The current government says lots of great things about capitalism and economic liberty, but you cannot institute capitalism by fiat. (Turning a healthy tank of fish into fish soup is easier than turning fish soup back into a healthy tank of fish.) Capitalism is highly productive because capitalists invest their capital in creating productive capacity in the expectation of profit. In Argentina, capitalists very reasonably have the expectation that, after the next election, their profits will be confiscated by the new administration. So they don't invest, except in forms that pay for themselves before the next election — mining minerals and planting crops, for example.
Massive state spending to expand productive capacity might be able to break this cycle, following the examples of the US, the USSR, the People's Republic of China, and Perón himself (before he abandoned the policy). But it's absolutely taboo for both the current "libertarian" administration and their Peronist political opponents.
In that same occasion he also shared stories about doing amateur radio with his dad as a kid, which was what got him interested in tech and later led to him becoming an entrepreneur
(ETA: Ah, missed reaperducer beat me to it)
For Armando Nahuelquir—his wife, Casilda, communicates to him that she is travelling to the campo and will arrive today.
Inosencio Belisle, in Chubut, is advised that his brother Baldobino is sick and hospitalized in General Roca. 11 4867 5309 if he would like to communicate . . . with his niece Malvina.
Attention Gómez Roca—we’re waiting for you in Puerto Deseado.
For Jorge Sepúlveda in Cajón de Ginebra: Paternoster asks that he get in touch today as soon as possible, at the same number as always.
For Jorge Crespo: Ricardo says that tomorrow, Tuesday, he will pass by his house.
For Emmanuel Ortega, wherever he is: his sister María wishes him a very happy birthday. She cares about him very much.
For Nicolás López, in Estancia La Elenita: his nephew Martín communicates that the four-wheel drive of the van is broken.
For Enrique Vega, in Telsen: his mother wishes him a very happy birthday. Over here, everyone is well.
Two years and five months since the irreparable physical loss of Fabio Ezequiel Leslie. His parents and siblings miss him and remember him with as much love as the first day. Praying for his eternal rest.
Avelino Delgado, of Establecimiento El Calafate, in the region of El Escorial, has lost a Hereford bull. If someone sees it, please notify him on this same channel.
For Jorge Pereyra, wherever he is: Jordan Salama, the American he met at Estancia La Adela, in Caleta Valdés, communicates that he wants to find him, if it’s possible to get in touch with the radio station. Whoever hears this, please let him know.
To transmit over the horizon as the AM stations do, you'd have to use similar frequencies: the mediumwave frequencies they do in fact use, or shortwave, which would permit the use of less unwieldy transmitting antennas.
So the basic setup would be: you still broadcast all the messages from a single high-powered sender, but you have some kind of analog radio receiver frontend running night and day on, say, 250 milliwatts, with a ferrite loopstick antenna like an AM radio uses. It's connected to, say, an STM32F103 (US$1.84, although here in Argentina a Blue Pill costs more like US$12 and probably comes with a clone chip with somewhat poorer analog characteristics) running at 72MHz, sampling the incoming signal at 1Msps and attempting to decode bits from it, referencing its timing to a ±50ppm quartz crystal.
The STM32F103x8/STM32F103xB dadashit tells me it uses a maximum of 50mA at 3.3 volts, so that's another 150 milliwatts. So this is a setup that probably needs about 0.4 watts, 9.6 watt hours per day, or 3000 milliamp hours per day; if you're receiving 24/7, you probably don't want to try to run it off non-rechargeable batteries the way you do with an AM radio, but a small solar panel and an 18650 rechargeable cell should be fine.
Or you could use crude time-domain multiplexing: power your receiver up, say, twice an hour for a second or two, at a time that the transmitter knows your receiver will be listening, and power back down if there's no message for you.
But it would be desirable to also transmit; it allows you to answer those messages without traveling those 80 kilometers to the post office. To get AM-radio sound quality good enough for people to understand speech, you need several thousand bits per second of channel capacity (4kHz at 10dB SNR into C = B lg(1 + S/N) gives us 13800 bits per second), and, roughly speaking, several thousand times more transmission power. https://www.lu4aa.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/LISTADO-... tells us that LU-20 Radio Chubut, one of the radio stations participating in this practice, transmits at "25/5" kilowatts, which I think means 25 kilowatts by day, 5 kilowatts by night (that's what the same notation means in the LU-4 row, according to https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU4_Radio_Nacional_Patagonia_A....)
If 2 bits per second is enough, you can probably get by with transmitting at 6000 times lower power, which is about 5 watts, or 1 watt at night. Decentralizing transmission incentivizes the use of higher frequencies, because they can use smaller antennas. At the extreme of 30MHz, a quarter-wave groundplane antenna only has to be 2.5 meters tall, and erecting even a 7.5-meter tower antenna seems eminently feasible to do on a shoestring rural sheep-herding estancia budget, since you don't have to deal with an HOA. And, if people are willing to cooperate to relay messages (a "mesh network", although the older term might be "radio relay league"), you can use lower power and get higher bandwidth.
The only part of this that would be news to radioaficionados decades ago is the radically lower price and low power of complex modulation schemes, due to cheap microcontrollers.
This is, of course, what Rhizomatica, Hermes, and MeshArg are trying to achieve, although MeshArg is using higher frequencies that are not suitable for long-distance communication unless you have a satellite or balloon or something.
The more difficult problem there is infosec, I'm guessing.
But we shouldn't exaggerate the literacy problem. This is Argentina we're talking about, not Lesotho or rural Laos; Chubut Province had 98% adult literacy in 02010, and that's probably improved since then, since everybody uses WhatsApp now.