Project anouncement: ham radio epistemology (working title)

Hey everyone!

I realised I haven't posted an update here in a minute, so I thought I'd give one. As hopefully everyone knows because I posted the text essay, I am working today to get out a short video about Charlie Kirk's murder and the misinformation surrounding it. After that I'll be working to sort my trans organising video out, because I feel like that's the next most urgent thing.

From there, the rest of the year my primary focus will be on finishing The Mad & The Mentally Ill and helping with the editing to finish the Red Planet documentary about the ZAD, because I want both of those finished before the year is out. My hope is that a thorough look at what life could look like without capitalism would be really useful to people right now, and I also know that people are suffering, and that we need mad liberation now more than ever. Both projects have been stuck and slowed down by various difficulties but I do think we can get them out by Christmas.

So on to today's anouncement: I've been working with my partner for a while on a technical project which is just starting to take form, messing around with LoRa devices, primarily meshtastic at the moment, to figure out what kinds of communications are available to people off the mainstream internet.

The reason for this project is that I've been fascinated for a long time with how we create parallel informational infrastructure, how we not only preserve knowledge but keep it alive in the sense that people are using it and engaging with and updating it. I as a trans person benefit from enormous amounts of knowledge that is stigmatised and has been repeatedly "discovered" by the mainstream and then suffered attempts to destroy it, and I've wanted to write an essay about how knowledge propagates that is outside of the mainstream but is good for people. The kind of stigmatised knowledge that is deliberately preserved stigmatised knowledge instead of just conspiracy silliness.

Anyway, I'm calling it Ham Radio Epistemology as a working title, and we'll see what form it takes, but my plan is to make a video which combines a technical exploration of what is possible through accessible LoRa devices and an essay about subaltern epistemology. It will be my main focus after the ZAD doc and Mad & Mentally Ill are finished, so I'll give updates and maybe some instructions for anyone who wants to follow along over the next few months

Love and solidarity

Sophie