Good luck, Kalmia, but to someone like me this seems like a crusade whose time has passed. I never listen even to live satellite radio, much less analog radio. My time is too valuable to sit through minute-long commercials, not be able to fast-forward, etc. Maybe I'm just a bit ahead of my time, but in a decade or so most people will feel the same way. Besides, broadcast radio probably isn't the most effective means of underground communication - signals are easy to jam, there's no encryption, you'll need to rely on a different technology to take calls, etc.
Mobile communication standards like
GPRS and
WiFi are becoming ever more universal, and because compression and error-correction is typically built into digital transport protocols they can work in circumstances where analog radio would only give you static.
We need to fight this battle on two fronts:
(1) Decentralization of Internet ACCESS - means you're not dependent on one company to connect you to the Internet. (And especially not a Fortune-500 company that is already in bed with the government.) Neighborhoods can set up their own local HotSpots (like the
BBS`es of yesteryear), so even if the rest of the world goes off-line people in this particular neighborhood can still communicate with each-other, and access services hosted within the neighborhood, like mirrors of important eBooks,
radio archives, etc. Then those HotSpots would need an independent way of communicating with each-other in a decentralized mesh (like
FidoNet-like networks of yesteryear, but of course much better). With every person investing a couple hundred dollars into a special router (more if you live in the boondocks), or one person in the neighborhood investing a couple thousand dollars and his time with everyone else having normal wireless equipment, a second Internet can be created, with all of the infrastructure owned entirely by the individuals participating in it.
(2) Decentralization of Internet CONTENT - on the Internet, use services that can be trusted in an emergency, and always look for ways to proliferate data. Take this forum for example (and let's pretend we occasionally use it to discuss something serious) - if its server goes down or can't be accessed then it's gone. If someone was to write a script that exports the content of this forum, perhaps shadowing it to a
Usenet group, the content of this forum could be preserved on thousands of servers world-wide. Even exporting an offline XML/ZIP extract (like
QWK of yesteryear) and distributing it via P2P networks would mean a forum can never be taken down without somebody else putting it right back up again. And, needless to say, trusting mega-corp sites like YouTube to house our content is a big no-no, P2P networks should be used instead. With a right multimedia-optimized protocol and browser plug-in, it would be just as fast and convenient.