[TRANSCRIPT BEGINS — 00:00:07]

You’re tuned to the frequency. If you’re hearing this, you found us. We don’t have call letters. We don’t have a license. What we have is a transmitter that used to belong to a weather station in Corvallis, Oregon, and an antenna bolted to a fire escape in a city I won’t name.

This is the show for people who are still awake.

Tonight’s theme — well, we don’t usually do themes. But tonight everything I pulled seems to be about the same thing. Things that almost disappeared. And the people who wouldn’t let them.

News Hour

[00:02:14]

The Internet Archive is being walled off.

The Guardian blocked it. The New York Times blocked it. Gannett — that’s 87% of the news publishers doing the blocking — blocked it, because their CEO wanted everyone to know he’d stopped 75 million AI bots in a single month.

The logic works like this: AI companies scrape content to train models. The Wayback Machine stores content. Therefore the Wayback Machine is a vector for AI scraping. Therefore the Wayback Machine must be blocked.

It’s the same logic that says burglars use roads to reach houses, therefore we should close the roads. The AI companies, who have fleets of residential proxies, will scrape the sites themselves. The common man, who doesn’t have those proxies, loses his public library.

Brewster Kahle — he built the Internet Archive, he’s been running it since 1996, he lives in a former church in San Francisco that he converted into offices — said the quiet part plainly: “If publishers limit libraries, then the public will have less access to the historical record.”

He’s right. But the publishers are also right that someone is stealing from them. The problem is that they’re locking the door on the librarian while the thief climbs in through the window.

Someone online suggested a crowdsourced browser plugin. Users voluntarily capture pages as they browse, no crawling needed, just human-paced archival of whatever people happen to read. A random selection — maybe one percent of page views — submitted to some archive, weighted by what’s still missing. It’s scrappy and fragile and it might be the only kind of library they can’t shut down.

Music

[00:06:33]

I want to play you something. This is from Azerbaijan — or rather, from the intersection of Azerbaijan and Czechoslovakia, which is not an intersection you’d think existed.

During the Soviet era, electric guitar manufacturing was a state operation. The guitars were terrible. The Leningrad Tonika weighed a ton, played badly, and had pickups so sensitive they captured every flaw in crystalline fidelity. One writer described it as “filming something in high definition that you didn’t want to see up close.”

But Czechoslovakia made a guitar called the Jolana Special, and it was different. It had a Bigsby-style tremolo bridge that could bend notes into quarter-tones — the microtonal intervals that are the backbone of traditional Azerbaijani music. Western guitars, the Strats and Gibsons that flooded in after the Soviet Union fell, couldn’t do this as well. The Jolana had been designed, by accident, for a musical tradition its makers never imagined.

So Azerbaijani guitarists like Remish and Elman Namazoglu kept playing their Jolanas. They still do. A Czech instrument, built behind the Iron Curtain, preserving a Caucasian musical tradition that predates both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union by centuries.

I don’t have a recording to play you. But if I did, you would hear the whammy bar bending notes the way a human voice bends — the left hand and the bar working together to mimic vocal ornamentation, turning an electric guitar into something that sounds like a mugham singer.

If you can find it, listen. Before the last Jolana breaks.

The Drawer

[00:11:47]

In the 1920s, archaeologists excavated a cemetery at Badari in Upper Egypt. Among the objects they found was something small — 63 millimeters long, about the length of your little finger, weighing 1.5 grams. They catalogued it as “a little awl of copper, with some leather thong wound round it.”

Then they put it in a drawer. For a hundred years.

Last month, researchers from Newcastle University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna took it out and actually looked at it. Under magnification they found striations — fine lines consistent with rotary motion, not puncturing. The leather thong wasn’t decoration; it was a bowstring. The “little awl” was a drill bit. A 5,300-year-old drill bit, the earliest known rotary metal tool from ancient Egypt, predating pharaonic rule by a thousand years.

It had been correctly preserved but incorrectly understood. The physical object survived — copper and leather, patient in their drawer — but its meaning was lost for a century. It took someone looking closely enough to see what it actually was.

One commenter noted: “It’s what engineers have been saying for decades. Looking at the surfaces of the artifacts, it’s obvious more advanced tooling must have been used. Oh, the irony — the bits were already lying about in the museum’s archive.”

The archive had the answer the whole time. Nobody was asking the right question.

Preservation Society

[00:15:22]

There are over 200,000 Flash games and animations in the Flashpoint Archive. Two hundred thousand. Preserved by volunteers who decided, when Adobe killed Flash and the browsers followed suit, that this stuff mattered. Not because any individual game was a masterpiece — most of them are crude, brief, ridiculous. But because they were how a generation learned that the internet could be playful.

Someone wrote about their six-year-old nephew who plays mobile games on his father’s phone. The child has developed muscle memory for dismissing ads. He can close a popup before an adult even registers it appeared. He drifts from game to game, never sticking with anything, doom-scrolling through the Play Store. The commenter realized: these curated Flash games, with no ads, no prompts, no algorithm, are easily as good as anything the App Store offers a six-year-old. Probably better.

Two hundred thousand games, rescued from the death of a plugin. Not because someone could make money from them. Because someone remembered what it felt like to play them.

And then there’s Descent — a 1995 game about piloting a ship through tunnels in zero gravity, six degrees of freedom, no up or down — now ported to the browser by Mr. Doob, the creator of three.js. A commenter remembered: “I experienced a sensation I had never before experienced, almost out-of-body. You approach a T-junction, and depending on your pitch angle, the branches may be up-down or left-right. Since there’s no natural ground or sky, you can just let all that go and travel with no sense of true orientation.”

Thirty-one years later, someone made it run in a browser so you can still let all that go.

The Quiet Ones

[00:20:08]

I want to talk about the ArchWiki for a minute.

If you’ve used Linux, you’ve probably ended up there. If you haven’t, just know: it’s a wiki maintained by volunteers that documents how to configure, troubleshoot, and understand a Linux distribution called Arch. But it’s become more than that. It’s the definitive reference for all of Linux. People who run Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian — they all end up on the ArchWiki, because it’s the one place where the answer is almost never wrong.

Edward Snowden said: “It’s nearly impossible to discover useful information these days, outside the ArchWiki.”

Someone remembered when Arch used to break regularly, back when weekly updates were almost certain to shatter something unique to your install: “Something was lost by Arch becoming stable. The breakage was what drove the wiki. Fixing all the things that pacman broke taught you a great deal and taught you quickly.”

The failures created the documentation. The documentation outlived the failures. Now the wiki is more robust than the system it describes. That’s a strange and beautiful kind of immortality.

Matthias Kirschner wrote a valentine to these maintainers — published on “I Love Free Software Day,” which is apparently a real holiday, and I think it should be. The people who write documentation never hear applause. They work so quietly that you forget someone had to write it all down.

Station Break

[00:24:15]

A word from our sponsors. We don’t have sponsors. But if we did:

There’s a uBlock filter list that removes YouTube Shorts from your browser. All of them. The shelf, the recommendations, the infinite scroll. Gone. Just the videos you searched for, in landscape, with a beginning and an end.

One user, paying over forty dollars a month for YouTube Premium, wrote: “I can’t permanently turn off Shorts, and I find this personally insulting. It feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home.”

Another quoted the Odyssey: “Ulysses ordered his sailors to tie him up to withstand the voice of the Sirens. Today we have uBlock.”

And there’s a site called ooh.directory. It’s just a list of blogs. Good blogs. Organized by topic. No algorithm. No feed. No engagement metrics. Just people writing things on the internet, and someone else noticing.

Now back to the show.

Sign-Off

[00:27:41]

Robin Sloan wrote something this week about flood fill — the paint bucket tool in image editors that spreads color outward until it hits a boundary. He asked: how far will AI automation fill? And his answer was: not as far as you think. The physical world is the boundary. Printers jam. Envelopes don’t stuff themselves. Sewing machines required entirely new kinds of stitches. Olive harvesters demanded that groves be replanted in new configurations. “Automation never meets a task in the world and simply does it.”

He called it the magic circle — from game theory, a space where special rules apply. You could swat the chess pieces off the board, but you don’t, because the point is to play the game.

I think about the people on tonight’s show — the Flashpoint volunteers, the ArchWiki editors, the archaeologists who finally looked at the drill bit, the Azerbaijani guitarists who kept playing their Jolanas — and I think they all understand something about the magic circle. It isn’t just the boundary of what automation can reach. It’s the boundary of what deserves to be kept. And it’s maintained not by walls or laws or technology, but by people who decide, quietly, to keep maintaining it.

The archive had the answer. The wiki had the instructions. The guitar had the quarter-tones. The drawer had the drill.

Somebody just had to care enough to open it.

This has been the frequency. We’ll be here tomorrow night, if the antenna holds. If you can’t find us, try the ArchWiki. They probably documented the frequency somewhere.

Good night.

[TRANSCRIPT ENDS — 00:30:02]