The Technical and Spiritual Manual for Postapocalyptic Radio Making was produced as part of SI22: Signal Lost, Archive Unzipped. The text was composed of two parts which concerned the how and why of postapocalyptic radio making. Part one was comprised of several diagrams illustrating how to make various pieces of FM radio equipment; transmitters and receivers for example. The second part included interviews with radio makers at Radio Worm. The Manual was licensed under Collective Conditions for Re-use. This license was developed by Constant and informs the following discussion of the text.

In short, the interviews had many transcription errors. Concerns were raised about the fact of publishing a text which did not accurately represent the people directly concerned with the material. There was a sense that interviewees were disappointed by the way the transcripts had mangled their spoken words. There was apprehension about the possibility of interviewees having words attributed to them which they never said. Furthermore, these apprehensions were raised by an interviewee after the event in the context of a reflective discussion. Circumspect of these concerns, I have been selective about the material presented in the slideshow and have not included excerpts from the interviews.

My questions are as follows: Does the CC4r provide a framework that assists with navigating through the ethical concerns outlined above? Or do the ethical concerns override? The manual was contentious. My contribution to the text was primarily in typesetting it with ConTeXt. As Maria has pointed out, however, I also rendered the transcripts which were, with minor changes here and there, placed in the Manual.

Perhaps I could have been more careful about which pages from the text to upload to the Wiki. I was clear with myself that I would not upload pages from the interviews. However, I did not fully take into account other concerns raised by interviewees which I have tangentially touched on above. Instead, what I uploaded sought to demonstrate capabilities afforded by the ConTeXt typesetting software. I also wanted to share some tricks I had picked up relating to vertical spacing. In view of the likelihood and location of someone encountering documentation of the manual, I have removed images from the slideshow which may be considered contentious.

I believe that scope for making such mistakes is built into the CC4r. On the one hand the license ‘favours re-use and generous access conditions’(Constant, 2023). On the other hand, it notes ‘that there may be reasons to refrain from release and re-use’ (Ibid.). Suppose I were to frame an act of release or re-use in terms of an antonymous or pseudonymous term. Is this a way to sidestep or shift the terms of what is at stake in the CC4r, namely re-use? For example, if I spoke of redistributing these parts of the Manual rather than re-using them. Would that be coherent with the CC4r? What does re-use become in such contexts? Is such a version of events a satisfying outcome of taking the ‘implications of (re-)use into account’ (Ibid.)?

https://hub.xpub.nl/bootleglibrary/book/866

Select pages from the Technical and Spiritual Manual for Postapocalyptic Radio Making, juxtaposed with the related code.
Diagram illustrating how to make a transmitter
Diagram illustrating how to make a receiver
Rain Received and Rain Decoded, by Wang and Zuzu
Image page, the Worm Bel
Images of Sound you see me, sound you don't by Lorenzo and Senka
Preamble to Part II: The Why

Bibliography

Constant (2023) ‘CC4r * COLLECTIVE CONDITIONS FOR RE-USE’, https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html [Online]. (Accessed 16 March 2024).