the timboucher experience

Table of Contents

1. Amateurs Welcome
2. Ham Culture As Cultural Snap-Shot of By-Gone America
3. Preserving Alternatives & Legacy Technologies
4. Safeguarding The Spectrum of Reality

Amateurs Welcome

Have been seeing a lot of positive chatter lately out of the ham community around the subjects of what is the amateur radio service and where is it going. Addmitedly, my exposure to the culture, community & history which supports and perpetuates this important technological paradigm has been limited. I’m a newbie and I haven’t taken any of the FCC exams or received my initiatory shamanic call sign/alphanumeric spirit animal, nor do I own any radio equipment - aside from a couple FM-AM receivers and an old borrowed CB handset with some crystals inside of it. I don’t even think they are the magic kind.

So I recognize that from an insider’s viewpoint of what ultimately is a hierarchical and traditionalist aesthetic system, that my outbursts and spoutings on what I think amateur radio and other forms of open community-based telecommunications are or ought to be may not really count for all that much. I don’t even have a call-sign, after all. But I do have a strong background in computer technology, and a tremendous unwavering devotion to the old-fashioned American ideals of free and open communication, and of harmonious self-determination and sovereignty of peoples working together for mutual benefit.

Ham Culture As Cultural Snap-Shot of By-Gone America

This is, in fact, a major part of what interests me so much about ham radio: is that it was birthed as a technology (and a supporting user aesthetic) at a particular point in history, and somehow - almost magically - encoded within the perpetuation of the technology itself is inbuilt a snapshot of what America once was all about. It’s like people focused their hopes and dreams, refining them in the inner fire of their imaginations, and then manifested creatively their intentions in the world at large through a technology which allowed them to express themselves and to form an authentic community built simply on service to one another and service to the technologies and frequencies which support that level of interaction.

In a world of rapidly changing, disruptive, chaotic and often unstable and unsustainable technologies, radio spectrum frequency transmission and reception has stood the test of time and proven its usefulness as a wholly separate and other paradigm. This, to me, is the kind of approach which will carry forward telecommunications into a future where any person with technology bought at a drug store can - in essence - become the receiving and transmitting hub for all the world’s knowledge.

Preserving Alternatives & Legacy Technologies

Amateur radio, in my eyes, ought to preserved as is, fully intact simply because of its historical status, its archaic tendencies and organizational structure: which, when you look at it, turn out to be not so very different from the kind of strategic thinking which originally spawned the internet. We don’t want to lose it as a human wisdom tradition amidst a sea of corporations spouting neologisms and throw-away brand names, all clamoring for a slice of the airwaves - which these other ham operators point out - are a limited natural resource. Electro-magnetic frequencies only go so far up and down the dial. What we do with them, what we transmit with them, what kind of communications are really worth it become more and more important.

I’m anxious, more than any other political changes occurring, to find out how the digital transition is going to affect the population of the United States. Most people, I feel like, aren’t aware of how basic technology works nowadays. The element of focus has gone someplace else, but the amateur radio service retains this as its central focus. Wrapped up somewhere in this is a lesson for how a common technological dream can become a real rallying point for the coming together of people to share their lives with one another, simple human communion.

Safeguarding The Spectrum of Reality

More broadly, the question of who controls radio spectrum and what the rules are is tightly bound up with how I view reality. I see consciousness itself as a field of experience, with a whole spectrum of options available to us: we can go out and have any kind of experiences we want as human beings, provided we have the resources to pull it off. When consciousness is viewed as a spectrum of possibilities, the limitations you place on acceptable or “normal” behavior can become arbitrary gradations which we pass on through our behaviors to those around us. But if we are able to sit up, look at ourselves, take notice of what kinds of things we’re receiving in our lives and what kinds of things we’re transmitting, we can take steps towards empowering our own communications - no matter what kinds of technology we’re using. Thank you.

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