You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Convenience

On internet radio and relinquishing control.

This past Friday, thousands(?) of people across America participated in a boycott of Amazon, Target, and Walmart to protest their rollbacks of DEI programs, as well as rising prices and their general corporate dominance. While one day of action isn’t enough to topple these giant companies, news coverage of the apparently-grassroots “blackout” sent a strong message and potentially got many people onboard with the idea of larger, more prolonged actions. Long-time activists like myself love to post about how one day is “not enough”, and they’re right, but as a teacher I always welcome these small entry-points into organized action. If people see that they can protest for one day, they can try for a week, then a month, until eventually they’re doing no-buy years. As others have pointed out, we’ve become too reliant on these companies to fulfill our basic needs, and real societal change will require long-term planning around how disabled people and elders will meet their needs in a post-Amazon world. Even more of us don’t necessarily need Amazon to deliver our goods to us, but we’ve gotten so used to the hyper-convenience of it all that we’ve forgotten alternatives even exist.

Anyway, here’s how an internet radio station called “SexFM” changed my life.

Inspired by the game Pacific Drive and its unique feature of being able to stream internet radio stations in-game, Julian Morley (most commonly known as the YouTube creator Noodle) founded SexFM with a few of his creative partners. (Don’t worry, the station is not actually erotic in nature.) I’ve been a fan of Noodle’s work for a few years, having gravitated to his style of putting the most effort into the smallest of details; many of his videos feature TV broadcast-style “bumpers” (the few seconds of content in between the regular programming and an advertising block) and his “cardboard cutout”-style videos, once a means to make shorter, easier-to-produce rants (literally “cardboard filler”), have gradually become his signature style.

SexFM is perhaps his most unique project to date: a genuine 24/7 livestreamed radio station complete with hundreds of tracks and pre-recorded bumpers featuring himself as “DJ Tolerant”, the AI voice taking TikTok by storm as the character Derek, and other collaborators as other DJs. The music featured on the station was largely house, 90s pop hits, and city pop, which were all right up my alley, plus the occasional joke track (imagine a mashup of Smash Mouth with about 20 other memeable songs). I tend to avoid parasocial relationships, but my heart undeniably lurched toward this creator when I heard The Vengaboys and Kylie Minogue pop up. In fact, the station had a narrative of sorts: it “takes place” in the year 1999, songs from the 90s were introduced as “new”, and songs from this millennium may have been introduced via hilarious bumpers with such convoluted explanations as being “from a yet-unreleased video game”. I say with complete sincerity that this is the best world-building I’ve ever heard from an internet radio station.

Not that I’m very familiar with the genre; like most music enjoyers, I’ve been in a love-hate relationship with Spotify for the past several years. I don’t dabble much in Spotify’s algorithmically-curated playlists, but when I do, I’m rarely surprised by what I hear; the same hundred or so artists I already know, shuffled in a new order based on increasingly-bespoke genre labels like “pumpkin spice”(?) and “pink pilates princess strut pop”(???). Frustrated with Spotify’s curation system (and their god-awful exploitation of artists), I decided a few months ago to start buying CDs again. I had gotten so used to what I knew—either expensive physical media or cheap-but-unlimited potential for discovery—that I completely missed the quiet, persistent hum of a third option.

To briefly summarize several tectonic shifts in how we engage with media, politics, and everything else: For many decades, we only listened to the music/news that played on our local radio stations. Then came the Internet, which changed everything by opening everyone with a dial-up connection up to the entire world of genres and perspectives. Then, however, came tech corporations with their recommendation algorithms, and our world shrunk back down again; your feed was personalized to what you already liked and your Internet exploration never left Facebook, TikTok, or your platform of choice. Perhaps your taste today is more diverse than it might have been pre-Internet, but it has little crossover with even your next door neighbor’s feed, and the likelihood of you being exposed to something entirely new is quite low once your algorithm has honed in on your desires. Hence, atomization, political polarization, the loneliness epidemic, the only common-denominator entertainment being remakes and sequels of old franchises, the devaluing of art, etc etc.

What’s the difference between an algorithm curating my music and a funny Internet man curating my music? In a way, both involve relinquishing some level of control: instead of me only choosing to hear music from my self-made playlists or the physical media I’ve purchased, I’m letting someone who’s not me choose how I spend my conscious experience. By tuning into one station, I’m locked into a small set of genres, much like I would be in a Spotify playlist. However, there’s something undeniably more human about radio: instead of a robot or design-by-committee, a few dedicated people whose tastes are similar enough to mine are able to provide me with so much more value; I’ve screenshotted literally dozens of track titles to add to my own Spotify playlists, and SexFM has even inspired me to get back into practicing my DJing.

Me and my DDJ FLX-400, which I dusted off recently thanks to SexFM.

Here’s something that was hard for me as a non-radio enjoyer listening to SexFM: no “skip” button. When I’m on Spotify and a song comes on that I’m not quite feeling, I tend to skip to the next song. That’s not possible on a livestream, so I’m forced to listen to whatever’s playing until the next track comes on. I was shocked by how frequently I reflexively reached for a button that wasn’t there; for all that I preach about taking back control over your entertainment, I’d been dead set on having optimal audio experiences 100% of the time. Relinquishing my authoritarian control over my own entertainment was cutting me off from experiencing something truly new, hand-picked for listeners like me, though crucially, not precisely me.

I believe that “100% convenience all the time” has vast—and dark—implications for our species. In a new video which can possibly be called a video essay (non-derogatory), Alec of the YouTube channel Technology Connections bemoaned how our over-reliance on technology is making us less curious and more divided. Particularly with the emergence of generative AI, which has huge implications for scientific research but seems to most often be used replace human workers with chat bots, it’s worth asking how we as a culture are going to continue relating to art. “Silicon Valley seems hellbent on making machines which can do our thinking for us. Why should any of us want that?”

SexFM went down after only a few weeks of operation. From the outside looking in, it seems as though maintaining the stream became too expensive and too time-consuming. I genuinely miss tuning into SexFM every day to hear the funny bumpers and discover even more amazing house tracks. I loved the station enough to become a Patreon supporter, though this was also shut down, only to be replaced with a page on the SexFM website immortalizing everyone who donated as “Registered SexFMers”…thanks for that, guys. Fortunately, the station will eventually return for another short run before being taken down forever. In the meantime, maybe I’ll keep tuning into other radio stations…I’m open to recommendations, but only from fellow humans.

#prayfordjsprite

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Bops, Vibes, & Jams

• Someone made an entire Spotify playlist of SexFM tracks…it’s not at all the same, but still, thank GOODNESS they did.

And now, your weekly Koko.

Koko the cat, curled up in my computer chair.

That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.

In solidarity,

-Anna