Media rodeo 37: Radio Free NYPD

radio ecologies, NYPD transmission infrastructure, thinking otherwise…

We begin with Christof Migone’s assessment of contemporary radio:

Radio voices are dead on arrival. Upon entrance to the studio, they are trained to sync lips to accepted tastes and are delivered to the listener excited, but hardly less than moribund. There are several factors working to stultify this delivery. Foremost is the monopolizing of radio space as carrier of information. “Fact: radio as wallpaper” (Moss 1990). Voices on radio are well combed and articulated, not masticated or salivated. They have been air-dried and dehydrated. “After seventy successful years in the wallpaper business, radio has many of the powers to flatten, smooth out, disembody and trivialize the information it conveys” (Moss 1990). It is no surprise that radio as a creative tool is still strange territory. There is a molding of the voice that standard radio requires; a predetermined format shapes the voice to its well-treaded contours. The mold is defined by a blandness that is crass, or, alternately, a crassness that is bland. The cast of the voice is now an immutable crutch. Even college and community radio stations cannot pretend to be free of this sort of ossification. They have become a viable alternative and in so doing have suffered no small amount of institutionalization. (HeadHole: Malfunctions and Dysfunctions of an FM Exciter)

Flip the power switch, spin the dial, tune in. The radio voice can tell you the weather, the traffic, who played drums on this recording, how you should listen to it. The radio voice offers an instruction booklet, a behavioral pamphlet for cultural and spatial regulation. It is because of radio’s deterritorialized quality of nowhere that it can achieve this instructional role; care, passion, life all point to the possibility of thinking otherwise, but the bland imposition of sonic territoriality upon the listener slots itself into subjectivity without trouble, trembling, or sharp edges.

Radio is an interesting technology. Not quite a technology, of course, because radio waves are classified as a natural resource. The electromagnetic waves permeating life must first be captured by the state, enclosed, and appropriated; then, they each receive a legible frequency and an inevitable callsign. WKCR, 89.9FM. WFMU, 91.1FM. WBAI, 99.5FM. The state will tell you that the information contained on these frequencies is ephemeral, just as the stations will tell you to tune! in! now! for a one-time-only program, never to be repeated again. But what’s missing is that FM radio waves propagate forever into eternity, carrying their transmitted information into the radiated vacuum of space. There they are remixed, looped, sampled by radioactive decay until the signals become garbled semiotic trash, no longer identifiable as anything but an electromagnetic pulse. If you missed a broadcast, perhaps you can catch it on Sun Ra’s Saturnian receiver.

As such, I begin with the understanding that radio possesses some quality that resists appropriation. It resists containment, legibility, structure, and enclosure by its very nature. Why then, is radio so easily a site of semiotic violence? Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Cuba are sonic propaganda machines for the usa, introducing a bland superstructure into radio that strips it of spontaneous meaning and affect. Portable radios were first wartime technologies, enabling the financialized drive towards efficiency that ended WWII. And the NYPD adopted handheld radios not long after—the war came home, carrying walkie talkies along the way.

NYPD radio history is long, but its modern segment begins when that war came home. The innovation of wartime radio technology was the portable two-way; soon, NYPD officers could be seen carrying the mammoth communication infrastructure on their backs, ready to phone home with news of any perceived disorder. Over time, this infrastructure was miniaturized, with Motorola producing the first radio system that fit in a car dashboard with two-way communication. The NYPD maintained its Motorola affinity for years until a brief switch to Vertex radios; this switch caused no shortage of controversy on online radio forums, but I’ve struggled to find 1. why and 2. why the NYPD made this switch in corporate allegiance.

Regardless, two-way radios allowed the NYPD to extend its spatial domination. Rather than callboxes that served as potential sites of NYPD violence and semiotic presence, radio makes it such that the NYPD is always everywhere. First, callboxes allow patrols across the city to request reinforcements at their location. Next, one-way broadcast signals allow Central to send officers where they are needed. This is the first transformation, extending the bureaucracy of the NYPD across the city as a sort of territorializing mesh; control can be enacted anywhere, emerging from Central like a semiotic phalanx. Next, two-way broadcast signals establish outposts of bureaucracy across the city. Anywhere a NYPD patrol car is, the roots of hierarchy dig into the soil. When the pigs pull away, uprooting mobile bureaucracy, the cracked concrete leaves reminders of semiotic presence. Finally, the NYPD completed the final modernization—opacity—in 2024. NYPD radios are no longer actually radios, instead moving to an entirely digital system that operates not on the free and open airwaves but the black box of NYPD comms. Journalists—and anyone else who, for good reason, may be interested in the movements of the pigs—can listen no more. Oversight, a specious and castrating promise in and of itself, is no more. Radio is no more. Radio is dead.

To avoid the black box of it all for just a moment, or at least for as long as we can, the NYPD’s new digital radio system comes with important infrastructural innovations. Information is far and few between, but a radio forum references this report to show that, before digitalization, the NYPD had one repeated frequency (broadcasting messages from Central to the city), two two-way frequencies (broadcasting between Central and patrols), and one encrypted two-way frequency (who knows). More than evidence of the NYPD’s gross unpreparedness for contemporary semiotic proliferation, this is the wallpaper of it all. The NYPD plays in the background—flip the power switch, spin the dial, and tune in to a rather limited set of frequencies telling you everything you need to know about police activity. Nothing happening on one channel? Switch to the other, where disembodied, packaged voices are calling in acts of jurisprudentially legitimated acts of state violence.

Now, the infrastructure of radio is everywhere and nowhere at once; removed from the airwaves, NYPD radio no longer has a proper frequency, spatial link, or transmission boundary. NYPD bureaucracy is everywhere, borrowing your WiFi or hotspot to propagate its violence. NYPD bureaucracy is nowhere, skipping from one network to another. This is not even to get into the stingrays—devices that capture cell phone data for the NYPD—and their two-way network of control. Now, NYPD can be anywhere you are, and it is always already everywhere you are not.

What is there to be done? Where do we go when one of the final, seemingly forgotten sources of policing transparency has finally been overtaken by the digitalized opacity of capital? When policing is neither here nor there, both here and there, forever shifting with the rhythm of urban space but none of its vitality? The New York State legislature has one solution—it overwhelmingly passed a bill that would reverse the NYPD’s communications digitalization, though so-called Governor Hochul has yet to decide one way or another.

And yet, surely this is not the answer. We knew before that NYPD frequencies were not always accurate, at times even broadcasting intentionally incorrect information to obfuscate state violence and pollute the semiotic river upon which journalistic canoes were bobbing. We knew that we did not have access to the encrypted frequency, that gaining access was a criminal offense—though quite an easy charge to accrue, with just a bit of open source radio tech. There must be something more to radio, something more to resistance across the deterritorialized flows of electromagnetic signals. Fred Moten writes in “Interpolation and Interpellation”:

It’s the anticipatory detour that animates “Ghetto Supastar.” I want to try to recover this sound that is, itself, anything but originary. This sonic event was already a recording, just as our access to it is made possible only by way of recordings. We move with a series of phonographic anticipations, messages encrypted, sent, and sending on (lower?) frequencies that Marx tunes to accidentally, for effect, without the necessary preparation. This absence of preparation or foresight in Marx, an anticipatory refusal to anticipate, is, though, the condition of the possibility of a richly augmented encounter with the chain of messages the speech or sound of the commodity carries. Or more precisely, the intensity and density of what could be thought here as his alternative modes of preparation, make possible a whole other experience of the sound of the event of the commodity’s speech, a whole other experience of this event/music.

NYPD radio seems relatively easily filtered through this schema; always already recorded, reactive, and reactionary, state transmissions are semiotic abstractions of events we already experienced as true. They are prepared, packaged, and revised by the moment of transmission. Broadcast folds them back inwards, inverting the preparation such that anticipation of the message will be retroactively secured by the information’s delivery. How to anticipate a call to arms? Be ready in your patrol car, foot on the gas pedal, right hand on the steering wheel, left hand on your gun. This anticipation is a price incurred by those who subject themselves to informatic bureaucracy and its creeping spatial extension, always waiting for shit to go wrong so you can leap into the action you’ve already pre-destined for yourself. When pigs do it, that price is a reward: power, necropolitical power, to legitimate or extinguish life.

Shall we refuse to anticipate? Digitalization does, after all, offer an occasion to stop our foresighted countersurveillance of the NYPD—but opacity runs both ways. Just as policing produces criminality, our responses to policing risk locking us into reactive affective structures that are defined, in the first case, by the policing we seek to resist. Here, digitalization offers a reminder to claim opacity for ourselves, to reject the semiotic economy that lays us bare and hangs us out to dry on undulating electromagnetic waves. When the NYPD speak on the radio, they imitate the commodity, claiming its bland objecthood to speak from nowhere. When we speak on the radio, listen, broadcast, transmit, record, and remix, we bear witness to the speech of the commodity; we hear the moment of fleshy contact between contiguous affective registers. We feel the energy of electromagnetism, compelled to action by its bump and shout (see The Screamers, Amiri Baraka). We refuse anticipation and the pre-packaged semiotic commodity, instead hearing on the radio in every moment a deterritorialized and deterritorializing impulse that goes in one ear but never quite out the other.

This is a radically diffuse understanding of radio, one in which it is not a commodity to be regulated by the state but just another potential site of affective flux. Radio is dead, but so are we—and we will speak the language of electromagnetic death if that is what it takes to introduce ruptures into the semiotic schema of state control. It feels almost too easy to celebrate the UK’s pirate radio stations, but there’s something there; there’s something in radio by and for the people who actually listen to it, radio for the sake of music rather than radio for the sake of money, control, and bureaucracy. What would it mean to be a pirate on the NYPD frequency? And does digitalization not open up infinitely more avenues for piracy and invasion at the same moment as it closes off the old ones? What would it mean to play music on a frequency reserved for the infrastructure of violence? Perhaps time will tell, perhaps not. But you should refuse the normative understanding of the NYPD’s move to digital radios; this is not a security measure, nor evidence of departmental efficiency. This is an attempt to steal what makes our radio work, to lock our dials on frequencies of domination such that they can capture our affective labor. Resist! Pirate! Slip through the cracks! Digitalization is death, but radio has been dead all along.

We end with an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s bourgeois novel, Infinite Jest. In all his shortcomings, perhaps DFW offers a more deterritorialized radio schema, one that may resist. And at the very least, it’s telling entertainment in the age of semiotic punchlines:

The engineer shivers int he bright chill and lights a gasper of his own and tells Madame Psychosis through the intercom that the whole range of levels is fine. Madame Psychosis is the only WYYY personality who brings in her own headset and jacks, plus a triptych screen. Over the screen’s left section are four clocks set for different Zones, plus a numberless disk someone hung for a joke, to designate the annularized Great Concavity’s No-Time. The E.S.T. clock’s trackable hand carves off the last seconds from the five minutes of dead air Madame Psychosis’s contract stipulates gets to precede her show. You can see her silhouette putting out the cigarette very methodically. She cues tonight’s bumper and theme music; the engineer flicks a level and pumps the music up the coaxial medulla and through the amps and boosters packed into the crawlspaces above the high false ceiling of the corpus callosum’s idle tennis courts and up and out the aerial that protrudes from the gray and bulbous surface of the Union’s roof. Institutional design has come a ways from I.M. Pei. M.I.T.’s near-new Student Union, off the corner of Ames and Memorial Drive., 6060 East Cambridge, is one enormous cerebral cortex of reinforced concrete and polymer compounds. Madame Psychosis is smoking again, listening, head cocked. Her tall screen will leak smoke for the show’s whole hour. The student engineer is counting down from five on an outstretched hand he can’t see how she sees. And as pinkie meets palm, she says what she’s said for three years of midnights, and opening bit that Mario Incandenza, the least cynical person in the history of Enfield MA, across the river, listening faithfully, finds, for all its black cynicism, terribly compelling:

Her silhouette leans and says ‘And Lo, for the Earth was empty of form, and void.

‘And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep.

‘And We said: ‘Look at that fucker Dance.’

A toneless male voice is then cued int o say It’s Sixty Minutes More Or Less With Madame Psychosis on YYY-109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band. The different sounds are encoded and pumped by the student engineer through the building’s corpus and out the roof’s aerial. This aerial, low-watt, has been rigged by the station’s EM-wienies to tilt and spin, not unlike a centrifugal theme-park-type ride, spraying the signal in all directions. Since the B.S. 1966 Hundt Act, the low-watt fringes of the FM band are the only part of the Wireless Spectrum still licensed for public broadcast. The deep-water green of FM tuners all over the campus’s labs and dorms and barnacled clots of grad apartments align themselves slowly towards the spatter’s center, moving toward the dial’s right, a little creepily, like plants toward light they can’t even see. Ratings are minor-league by the pre-InterLace broadcast standards of yore, but they are rock-solid consistent. Audience demand for Madame Psychosis has been, from the very start, inelastic. The aerial, inclined at about the angle of a 3-km. cannon, spins in a blurred ellipse—its rotary base is elliptical because that’s the only shape the EM-wienies could rig a mold for. Obstructed on all sides by the tall buildings of East Cambridge and Commercial Drive and serious Downtown, though, only a couple thin pie-slices of signal escape M.I.T. proper, e.g. through the P.E.-Dept gap of barely used lacrosse and soccer fields between the Philology and Low-Temp Physics complexes on Mem. Dr. and then across the florid-purple nighttime breadth of the historic Charles River, then through the heavy flow of traffic on Storrow Dr. on the Chuck’s other side, so that by the time the signal laps at upper Brighton and Enfield you need almost surveillance-grade attenuation to filter it in out of the EM-miasma of cellular and inter console phone transmissions and TPs’ EM-auras that crowd the FM fringes from every side. Unless, that is, your tuner is lucky enough to be located at the apex of a tall and more or less denuded hill, in Enfield, in which case you find yourself right in YYY’s centrifugal line of fire.

Madame Psychosis eschews chatty openings and contextual filler. Her hour is compact and no-nonsense.