Conclusions

We live in an extraordinary time when the democratic cornucopia of media is very close to becoming reality and where there are hardly any technical barriers, and if there are the free software community will be capable of solving them. Yet the power elites have already found ways of either subverting that and subverting the creative impulse and the desire of the people, or they are simply moving the goalposts by reminding us that they have naked force on their side.

Regarding radio, the interesting effect is that after 100 years the medium is now in the process of dissolution. Radio can now be produced through software suites such as dyne:bolic by a 15 year old kid alone at home in Ramallah or Bangalore. The apparatic form and radio as a social imaginary signification are drifting apart again. The assemblage of studio-transmitter-receiver is, while still existing, a technically highly obsolescent model. While the technically overdeveloped countries switch to Digital Audio Broadcast (notable the absence of radio in that acronym) old fashioned radio is still relevant in underdeveloped countries and for cash poor community radio activists. However, 'radio' can now have so many different appearances, it can be sent and received on the internet as a live-stream, it can be downloaded as a podcast and listened to on an MP3 player, on the mobile phone or via digital radio in the car. In particular the ubiquituousness of mobile phones, where each mobile is actually a full blown computer plus two-way radio transceiver, and the eagerness of mobile phone companies to open new revenue streams can be expected to generate new formats of distribution of audio 'content'. The use of the word radio in this context is increasingly feeling nostalgic. However, I am not predicting the imminent death of radio either. As we all know media and art forms pronounced dead live longer. All that I am saying is that the social imaginary signification of radio is opening up and separating itself from a fixed association with any given apparatic form. What radio is or will be is completely up for grabs. It is quite unlikely that radio will be in the future like what some private commercial stations have become (and what unfortunately is imitated by public radio) -- an audio jukebox which plays a continuous stream of music. With blogging, audio blogging, live streaming projects blossoming around the world, it is also unclear if radio will have a future as a top down journalistic news medium. Through the net and the general process of convergence, corrosion and dissolution of media a lot of hybrid interactive and participative forms can be realized, in principle.

As we have reached a stage where technically everything seems possible, it is once more time for artists to formulate an utopian potential of radio which goes beyond the status quo. The big problem that we have politically is that of the technologically developed mass society which is characterised by a high dependency on large buerocratic and technological systems which can neither be easily changed nor turned off. (Marcuse 1964) Those life support systems sustain biological life now without being sustainable in the long term. However, the functioning of the system and the possibility of leading a relatively easy life for the majority of people in highly developed countries have made real politics in those countries almost impossible. Politics has been replaced by biopolitics. (Agamben 2002) Thus, the old idea that the public domain is a political battleground about people's support for competing systems is dead, as there are no competing systems (or the differences are quite marginal). Meanwhile the masses enjoy oscillations of 'individuality' along the axis of a very wide and deep reaching conformity. The idea that counter-cultural or subcultural media can alter people's consciousness and so lead out of that dilemma is not an answer anymore. What progressive artists maybe can do is to abandon that battle field that was traditionally seen as content and focus on unravelling the system from within by conducting a more rigorous analysis of those systems and finding ways of using their properties against them. While the focus on new tools and instruments that dominated the first decade of the internet was a necessary step, now it is maybe time for more radical DIY strategies which do not only focus on the advanced tools and concepts of the free software scene but on the ways those tools are socially embedded and collectively used. New 'grow your own' strategies must not approach media and communication technology in an isolated way but in connection to other systems including energy, food, learning, health and what Nick Dyer-Witheford calls in relation to the early Marx conviviality.1 Translated onto radio this could mean that it becomes even more important that artists claim the right to make their own signals and transmissions and create polymorphic as well as autonomous media structures, online, offline, cabled-bound and wireless. My personal conclusion is that I am going back to the childhood days and become again a listener to voices in the aether. I belief that one particular quality of radio which could give it longevity as a medium beyond the lifespan of its apparatic form is voice -- that what lies between the meaning of biologically having a voice and finding a political voice, the aural qualities of human voices and their relationship to mental faculties and the project of emancipation which is still waiting to be fulfilled.

• 1. cf. Dyer-Witheford 2006