Free Radio Rwanda

Analogue democracies and digital dystopias

Photo by Claus Grünstäudl on Unsplash

Somewhere, lost in the brushstrokes of his latest masterpiece, George W. Bush must be feeling wistful. He is no longer the dominant villain of the 21st century to the American left, and it’s not even close. The post-9/11 security state he helped create, so feared by the progressives of that era, has metastasized into an absurd Orwellian nightmare under Trump. At home and abroad, the regime of his Republican successor can’t even be bothered to hide the extent of their trespasses. A Project for a New American Century, indeed. Things are different now. The rise of American fascism, the end of the democratic experiment, and WW 3 are all on the table. Stakes is high.

It didn’t feel quite so dire, back in Austin in 1999, kicking around in the days when Bush was just the governor of Texas, and buildings hadn’t begun to be knocked out of the sky by airplanes. To me and my friends, the United States was the primary antagonist of a capitalist system that was slowly sucking the world dry. Some of us thought we could do something about it, riding high on momentum of the WTO protests in Seattle that had just wrapped up when I rolled into town that fall. Some of us were a little more nihilistic, just hanging around in the park until Food Not Bombs showed up to feed the miscreants before shuffling off with our rucksacks to make enough cash at the Plasma Center to get drunk that night. Whether our country was ripe for anarchist revolution or just a hopeless carcass to leech off of long enough to live out our youth in all of its restless glory didn’t seem to matter too much. We were living on the margins, and we liked it that way. There was a raging fire in some backyard just about every night, no one I knew had a real job or any inclination of finding one, and the nights stayed warm enough most of the year to ride out with the Texas wind in your hair on a salvaged bike. If you needed a change of luck you jumped a freight train or stuck your thumb out on the road. We all knew that things were fucked, and the whole system would come crashing down at some point. Some of the more serious activists would wax prophetically about how it might go down, and what we could do to make that happen. If Mumia dies, fire in the skies. But to a lot of us, it all seemed far off and fraught. If the Panthers and the Weather Underground couldn’t get it done, what were a bunch of kids who couldn’t stay sober past noon gonna do about it?

There was one cause both of these factions could agree on, though. One place where the barbaric drunken punks and the strident political activists could come together in the pursuit of a common ground that crackled with the promise of real autonomy. It lived in a garden shed in the backyard of a boisterous woman known to everyone as Reckless. A few turntables and a couple microphones and a bunch of amps fed into a tangle of chords running to a concrete slab a couple yards away that housed the mythical transmitter of Free Radio Austin, salvaged from a raid by the FCC earlier that year. The story of how all that went down seems a bit hazy and apocryphal to me at this point but by the time I got on the scene the small pirate radio station was the wild hope of every anarchist in Austin, an upstart in a sea of corporate media, and a middle finger to the Bushes of the world.

The programming was all over the map. Everything from black metal to bizarre sea shanties to hip-hop and all points in between. Anyone who went through the proper channels could show up with a stack of records or just spit for an hour or two. There was nothing standing between the broadcaster and the audience. Although the political programming was reliably far left, Reckless herself would later go on record with the press that they wouldn’t stop a Nazi from signing on, at least in theory.¹ This might seem out of pocket to your average leftist today, but the rumors are true-the suppression of free speech so favorable on both sides of the spectrum today was once an anathema to the radicals of a quarter century ago.

Owing to this, Free Radio Austin had a big target in its back from the FCC and presumably the burgeoning conservative power well on its way to the White House that shared the city with it. I can’t say for sure that Bush was behind the machinations to shut down FRA-which happened twice, both times at the hands of the FCC-but in the run up to the 2000 election the fringe radicals and misfits that made up the leftist community in Austin were starting to feel the heat. After the second and final time the station was shuttered, the cops busted a party for the Yellow Bikes Community Project at a local coffeehouse. Myself and a few friends were arrested when a full squad of cop cars bulrushed a guy peeing against a fence in what was a pretty obvious stakeout. The ensuing scuffle was full of the kind of chaos you might expect from such an encounter, and the message was pretty clear to all of us: we have our eyes on you.

I doubt I would recognize East Austin if I went back there today. Perhaps the Bush era sweeps were the harbinger of the change that was coming for everyone, everywhere. The post-9/11 rise of the technocrats and their stainless steamroller flattened the vibrant idiosyncrasies which used to give cities like Austin their charm. And perhaps the heyday of Free Radio Austin was a portent of a dark undercurrent in air as well, as the analogue signals gave way to the digital age, and the democratic promise of flipping the dial to find an anarchist wingnut spouting philosophy was subsumed in an endless sea of algorithmic opportunity. An ocean so vast and deafening in its scope that only the loudest and most bombastic could be heard, or allowed to be heard, over the roar of the waves.

It’s kind of a strange irony that Alex Jones cut his teeth on the edges of the same community that gave birth to FRA. For all I know he may even have sat in front of the microphone in that dingy shed and teased out a trial run of his crazed elocutions that went on to make him a household name. I never crossed paths with him back then, but I knew people who did, and though he was a far cry from the latter day Rush Limbaugh he is today, most of my community would have held his views at arm’s length even then. Around the peak of his popularity, a friend told me that she went home one day to find her entire family sitting in front of a laptop in rapt attention to one of his sermons. That it felt like Orwell’s Two Minute Hate had finally come to life, in her living room. But as our discourse has grown more fragmented and exponentially augmented by spiraling divisiveness, even his most unhinged ranting is starting to feel quaint in comparison to the bile that spills out of social media by the second these days. In the late 90s it felt like the keys to some grand democratic uprising were to be found in giving voice to the voiceless, and all that was needed to get over the hump was to take back control of the airwaves from the corporations that served as its gatekeepers. Now, the gates have long since been blown off the hinges. Anyone can start a podcast (they even let me have one), and with a little effort and minimal cost one can instantly broadcast their views to anyone who will listen. If you would have told me that in 1999, I would have said that sounds like progress. But in practice, it has served as nothing more than a piece of pig iron loaded onto the gas pedal of our collective shuttle as it heads straight for the precipice.

I don’t need to remind anyone of the kind of blistering psychosis that has come howling out of the internet in the last decade, particularly in the last year. We’ve all seen the Tweets, the Truths, the Notes. The callous disregard for human life coming from people who in the same breath promote their virtuous Christianity or egalitarian Marxism. The ease with which the sheltering anonymity of the online world allows the user to lambast the other, and the ready chorus of sycophants who will come to their aid as long as the assailant is one of them. The more of it you consume, the easier it becomes to imagine the only solution is to eradicate the people who could allow this kind of venom into their hearts. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk we watched as the online right by and large declared that the left was wholly unredeemable in the wake of some sporadic celebrations of his death. That we could not live side by side with them any longer. To myself and many others this was a frightening manifestation of tribalism taken too far, a warning that things were spiraling fast. When Rene Good was murdered by an ICE officer a few weeks ago, the reaction of many on the right was a similar ghoulish shadenfreude, and in the days after I started to understand at last how those same people might feel that they just couldn’t live in a country with people who thought of their fellow citizens like that, because this was how I now felt about them. For me, this was a frightening and sobering revelation. As my friend Prester John Andrews put it, ‘It’s like Radio Rwanda on every channel.’

Radio Rwanda, or more precisely, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, was the infamous propaganda arm of the pro-Hutu militants responsible for the 1994 genocide which claimed the lives of some one million Tutsis. In the years following the Rwandan Civil War, the station played a pivotal role in deepening the enmity between the two groups, a division rooted in an ancient factionalism deliberately exploited by the German and Belgian colonial powers during the periods of their respective dominion over the country. The station was used to broadcast a steady stream of hate speech against the Tutsis, with false criminal accusations and calls for violence so numerous that it earned the nickname “Radio Machete” after the weapon most synonymous with the gruesome massacres that were unfolding in the country.

Societies that aren’t about to start killing each other in internecine conflicts don’t normalize the spread of this kind of hate speech in the public sphere. But that is precisely what we’ve done. I’m not saying that we have or will embrace the kind of genocide that occured in Rwanda in the 90s, but the man behind the microphone is here, and the bodies are starting to pile up.

It doesn’t do much good to sit here and say we all should have seen this coming. And in truth, we didn’t suffer from a lack of warning so much as a learned helplessness, a hypernormalisation of it all. It was on every channel, and we became inured to the dangers. Still, I can’t help but feel a bit wistful myself. What we wound up with was a sinister inversion of the thing many of us were striving for. In the days of pirate radio, you could come across some random lunatic blasting out of your dashboard on the interstate, like a siren song. It might have been beautiful or deranged or both. But we were tied to the mast then. Now that the whole ship has gone and thrown the wax from their ears into the sea, those rocks are coming fast, and we’re not ready for them.

1. The quote, from a 2001 article in the Austin Chronicle: “People would ask us, ‘Well, if a bunch of Nazis wanted to be on Free Radio, would you let them?’ And our answer was yes. Free speech means you also advocate the rights of the people with whom you disagree.” For full context and a good overview of the FRA era in Austin, read the whole article.