infrastructure
I turned from the kitchen counter, iPhone and MeshCore tracker in hand1. “Okay,” I told my best friend, all geared up to infodump, “look at this.” I extended my phone toward her. “That’s the public channel. And here’s where you make a private encrypted channel, for friends and family. Like, uhh, IRC.” There are antennae all over our area, I explained—on rooftops mainly—but some people hang a solar antenna in a tree when they go camping, creating a temporary canopy of radio coverage.
“My GPS is turned off right now,” I continued, “but I’d share my location with you. And I think that’s the difference. I don’t want to share my location with Apple, I don’t want my location to determine whether my insurance premiums go up. I want you to know where I am, not… Adam and Eve and all their descendants to know where I am.”
My friend was laughing.
I’d texted her the night before. “I’m going all-in on a new hobby,” I’d started.
Oh, how cool! Her husband had been trying to get her into ham radio, she explained. (“Girls text,” I replied2.)
The truth is, I’d really wanted to use Meshtastic—for superficial aesthetic reasons, namely the SocialMesh app. (Its developer claims MeshCore support is coming, a questionable claim; for Meshtastic, however, SocialMesh is awesome.)
After an hour or so, though, I’d accepted I was all alone in the Meshtastic universe. I’d consulted a live map of live nodes in my region; grumbling, I’d reflashed my tracker for MeshCore, which uses a different frequency, i.e. the one everyone else is on.
In practice, MeshCore is better at getting messages across hills and valleys, so it is what strapping outdoorsmen use here in the American West. As far as I can tell, Meshtastic is more like Nintendo Streetpass—or maybe that’s just SocialMesh going to my head. Either way, you can stick an inexpensive magnetic antenna to the hood of your car, like an undercover cop attaching a siren in a 1970s police procedural.
“Well, when we’re really out in the boonies,” my best friend told me, understandably leery of dragging around a portable radio antenna3, “we use satellite.”
“I’ve heard of people toting their Starlink—” I began, uncertain.
She frowned. “No, we use InReach. Garmin InReach? Here, look.” She opened an app on her Android and showed me texts from her dad. I was reeling. In our late teens she and he used to use T-Mobile’s “walkie-talkie” mode (RIP). This had been a real scream right in the middle of the grocery store. “And I like that you don’t need the Garmin app on your phone—”
“Okay,” I said, “okay, exactly. Okay, I bought the MeshCore tracker because… I was looking at a Garmin watch.” I sighed. “My gift card is burning a little hole in my pocket,” I admitted now.
I’d been given a gift card in lieu of receiving a new phone. I’d decided to wait on making a choice; the gift card is supposed to sit in a drawer while I figure out what I actually want to do.
“So someone bought the Commodore trademark,” I began. “And is releasing a dumbphone.” Well, a hybrid phone: a Linux-based OS with a separate Android sandbox environment that won’t be able to fully connect to Google services.
“Oh, I love that,” she said.
“Right. But it hasn’t formally been approved by the FCC yet,” I said, cringing. “So I might still get a Mudita Kompakt4, and I might not. I need to wait.” And I like that I can technically use a Garmin watch without a phone, and I like that I can technically use Meshtastic or MeshCore without a phone. For now I’m just screwing around.
Now I sighed. “What happened… to my iPhone… I will never know for sure,” I said to her meaningfully. She nodded. “All I know is, lightning struck the house, lightning struck a tree, the Internet went out, and then I couldn’t use data on my phone until I flew to another state.” I’ve dwelled on it for almost two years, and it’s still baffling. The intricacies of how network gateways work, how to flush an iPhone’s background cache, might forever remain a mystery to me. “But I never want it to happen again,” I said to her.
To say that the whole inexplicable experience had turned me off iOS—and, too, the larger “Internet of Things” ecosystem, an invisible corporate battle that I don’t want clogging my airspace—would be an understatement. What is clear, however, is that consistent channels for clear communication might be much more tenuous, more fragile, than one realizes.
By this time I’d followed my friend and her kids out to her car, prattling the whole way. “It’s decentralization5,” I continued. “If all communications are centralized on just your phone, everything fails all at once.”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes flashing. She’d been sitting in her vehicle; I’d been talking at her from the front bumper. She got back out of the car.
“We’re at the beginning of Watership Down6,” she said to me.
I stared at her.
“Bunnies… are… killing each other?” I asked her, frowning in confusion.
“Yes,” she said, staring back. “Have you ever read Watership Down?”
“No!” I said, shaking my head, continuing to stare quizzically, waiting for her to explain.
“We’re listening to the audiobook right now,” she finally said, “in the car. That’s why I asked my son to pause it.”
“Oh!” I said. “Oh! I’m sorry, I thought you meant we were at the beginning of Watership Down sociopolitically—”
She started cackling.
“—and I was just thinking, like, oh wow, I’ve never known you to go all-in on an extended metaphor before—”
“No,” she said dryly, “I meant we’re at the beginning literally,” and we hugged each other goodbye.
Holy Moses, I was gonna post this to journal.jennfrank.net and it turns out write.as doesn’t natively support footnotes! Well, that’s good for my fellow footnotes-freaks to know.
You don’t need a smartphone to communicate on mesh; people are creating, like, e-ink handhelds. What is crucial is a radio antenna suited to the task, hooked up to a power source and a little display, and some of these antennae are incredibly tiny. So it is like ham radio, except that you don’t have to get certified by the FCC to be a legal operator of, y’know, your antenna and handheld.↩
A month ago or so, I was helping a friend complete an internal review for an upcoming major-IP fighting game; I’d remotely joined as player 2 using Parsec. “Oh my god,” I said to him on speakerphone, reeling a bit, “your graphics card is really really good.” Like, I was unprepared for how good his computer would look on my screen.
We were evenly-matched in a way that was gratifying for my friend, I think, in that he’d already gleaned a certain amount of experience with this game, but I was keeping up and not making it totally easy (and I was also not the game’s own developers, repeatedly crushing him). It was my first time in a long time competing against anyone; I was trying to keep a relative lid on my trash-talk impulses. “Oh my god I am so mad right now!” I said, to my friend’s little gremlin giggles.
Exhilarated, he asked me why we’d never gamed on something like Xbox Live before. I went silent. After a ponderous pause I reminded him that voice chat is not a whole lot of fun for me, but I’ll do it when absolutely necessary (as in Final Fantasy XIV).↩
“How does SiriusXM work in an old car?” the zillennial suddenly asked me. This was a couple days before Dolly Parton passed away; for whatever reason, my resulting grief had plunged me directly into mesh communication.
I wasn’t totally sure I understood what she was asking. I explained that Sirius or XM was often already built into older cars—with a satellite antenna for one-way data transmission—and that it does help to have, at the very least, some sort of all-text display for the stereo.
“But even before satellite radio,” I said to her, “I think I was shocked the first time I saw a stereo displaying the text of what song was playing over the air.” The metadata? “Like, until then, I don’t think I even realized you could transmit… text, other types of data, over the airwaves.” I know, I know, this is asinine. If you can transmit sound and pictures through the air, why wouldn’t you be able to transmit letters and characters and certain emoji? Duh. (Briefly—living in a relatively remote location after my parents passed away—I was on radio Internet. My Internet was spotty, as my rooftop antenna was being blocked by a neighbor’s tree.)
Anyway, the zillennial had been trying to figure out how her dad had managed to listen to XM in an old vehicle, in a pre-smartphone era, without any sort of display or touchscreen, or any apps, and I’d already accidentally mentioned the existence of standalone radio tuners with their own display, buttons, antenna. “That’s what he had,” she told me.↩
The Mudita Kompakt and, presumably, the Commodore Callback 8020, have a few specific features in common: both have a physical “privacy” switch; both can run maps apps and a Lyft app; both can function as a portable WiFi hotspot. I guess that last one is true of most phones, smart or dumb.
Similar to my beloved Boox Palma 1, the Mudita Kompakt runs its own custom version of Android, which puts it at real risk of sooner-rather-than-later obsolescence. With both the Mudita Kompakt as well as the Commodore Callback 8020, sideloading Android application packages (APKs) can be accomplished with Aurora. You can install Android apps without involving Google at all, a loophole that Google is currently attempting to close. What will still work tomorrow? It’s a big question, requiring long-term vision and adaptability.↩
Umberto Eco, of all people, was interviewed by WIRED Magazine in 1997, likely about what he’d termed ur-fascism, and this is exactly what he went on and on about. Like, I was a teen and I haven’t read the interview since, but obviously the broad strokes have really stuck with me. Eco was extolling widespread adoption of self-hosted email and other services—basically advocating for the Fediverse and XMPP—because if everything is centralized, if one corporation runs your communication services or hosts your data, what happens when that single node fails?
And we’ve already experienced this in the intervening years: the murder of both Gchat and Google Reader, a one-two punch, immediately disenfranchised people, changing how they engage with the Internet and with one another.↩
I just looked up the plot! JFC!
I’m currently located in the American West, “High Country,” where water rights are an issue and wild horses are regularly rounded up and displaced or, yeah, probably slaughtered. There’s also the recent stripping down of the National Forest Service. Tensions are high in this region, as it seems clear that “public” lands are being razed for eventual sale to the highest bidder—in this case, private info-collection corporations looking for cheap land for their datacenters.↩