About the project

I'm a broadcast network engineer, a radio guy, and probably the kind of person who keeps way too much old technology in a junk drawer.

This show is about digital ownership, digital privacy, and enshittification: what happens when things that used to just work suddenly need an app, an account, an internet connection, and a monthly subscription to do the exact same thing they used to do for free. Somewhere along the way, we stopped owning a lot of the things we buy, and our data became part of the deal.

Radio is a big part of that story.

I grew up in Tampa listening to AM and FM radio, getting hooked on WFLZ during the Power Pig era when I was five years old. As a teenager, I was doing volunteer technical work at a community media station, learning to solder and patch cables before I could even drive. Eventually I went through the Connecticut School of Broadcasting and spent nearly a decade running my own internet radio station from my house. Just me, an Icecast server, a CentovaCast panel, and enough stubbornness to keep the thing on the air.

My career eventually took me from programming, board operating, and being on the air in La Crosse into broadcast engineering. I moved into transmitter and field engineering before eventually landing in broadcast networking, where I work today supporting a group of public media stations. I hold a CBNT certification through the Society of Broadcast Engineers, and my day job puts me pretty close to the entire signal chain, from RF and transmitters to networks and everything in between.

That background is part of why I find the changes happening to technology so fascinating.

Radio went through its own version of this transformation. Local DJs choosing records became corporate playlists. A medium that once required nothing more than a receiver became something increasingly tied to apps, accounts, platforms, and subscriptions. The same thing happened to music, movies, phones, and just about everything else.

And sometimes I miss the stuff that didn't need any of that.

Burned CDs. Video stores where the clerk actually knew what movies were worth watching. Phones that existed primarily to make phone calls. Technology that was limited in ways that sometimes made it better.

This isn't a nostalgia show, though. It's about figuring out what we gained, what we gave up, and whether convenience is always worth the trade.

No guests. No sponsors reading copy I didn't write. Just one guy who grew up with dial-up, AM/FM static, and a junk drawer full of obsolete technology, trying to make sense of where all of this went.