I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the SuperBox

Doc Searls covers The Great Mexican Border Blasters, which were enormous—up to half a million watts—radio stations licensed in Mexico, targeting the US market. Not just Texas, the entire USA on a good night.

With lots of watts it took control, the first one of its kind. Billy Gibbons said, Even though Dusty, Frank, and I grew up in different part of Texas we listened to the same stations, particularly the X stations and, as a result, we gained a lot of the same musical and cultural points of reference.

“The X” wasn’t playing Mexican music. They were playing the music of the USA back to us. And people remember the border blaster stations fondly, despite the sketchy ads. So if you missed out on the days of the infamous goat gland treatment and the “genuine WHITE BIBLE autographed by JESUS CHRIST” maybe you won’t miss out this time. There’s a new “blaster” medium spreading here. Just like the X…

It’s imported from a country with food we love.

It’s feeding our own events and culture back to us.

It’s got all the right people mad.

It’s the SuperBox.

Yes, Think twice before installing this device promising free movies, but seriously, the ad trackers on supposedly legit, USA-maintained devices are a national security menace that our own Army, Navy, and Air Force need to turn off too, so whatevs. Yeah, if you bring home a SuperBox, the dreaded Red Chinese have root on a media server on your home network, but honestly the typical American has more in common with a Communist Party commissar than with the weird AI cultists running the big companies closer to home. (Both would un-alive most of us given the chance, but the Communists would keep more of us around to work the collective farms, while the TESCREAL oligarchs likely expect they can get by with a lower survival rate and more uploading.)

So Everyone is stealing TV. I’m not even going to pretend to understand The cheapest NFL streaming options or how to figure out what movie is available where. Personally, I go to the public library for books, comics, and DVDs. But I can see the appeal, and I can also see that I’m missing out on a trend. Just as a lot of the music that made it big on the X stations wasn’t the music that the established record business wanted to push, the SuperBox going to affect the culture. Somehow.

Bonus links

Are Amazon’s latest “advertising” shenanigans resulting in higher prices for shoppers? Did you have to ask? Jeromy Sonne explains Amazon’s FTC Lawsuit And Trickle Down Ad Fees To Consumers and Cory Doctorow covers how Amazon achieves enshittification inception. Lara O’Reilly interviews some advertising experts who claim that Amazon’s fight with the FTC contains an uncomfortable lesson for advertisers. But maybe the answer isn’t just “don’t let Amazon measure their own ad results” (that’s obvious) but something more general. Amazon doesn’t pay their damn taxes. Is there any reason to expect them not to cheat everyone else, too? (Also, “retail media” is not advertising. It’s slotting fees.)

Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA (via Molly White.)

Datacenters in Spaaaaaaace! by Quinn Norton. (According to Steve Blank, going underground is better.)