[SurrealPolitiks]

Here at the Radical Agenda, we are occasionally asked by the listener “How can I help?”

Our first answer is, predictably, financially. Occasionally, we invoke a catch phrase from Goodfellas to make the point.

But money is of course a means, not an end in itself. We want resources so we can sustain our efforts and pay for the efforts of others. So, when people are in a position to offer their efforts, we see the sense in taking the central bank out of the equation.

And of course, there is plenty of work to be done here. The nature of this project is not such that a point of satisfaction can be reached. If all of Silicon Valley suddenly started listening to the shows, abandoned their Leftist delusions and pledged their lives and fortunes to the production, we would happily run them ragged until we are all dead of old age and there would still be work to do.

These tasks range from highly specialized technical work that requires years of experience, a level of trust, and often, a legally binding non-disclosure agreement, to far more mundane matters like sharing content on social media or helping to organize compilations of old shows.

If you’ll pardon your humble correspondent some less than humble observations, I’d like to note something that should be obvious to the savvy observer.

What separates us from our goals is not a lack of talent on my part. Nor a lack of work ethic. I devote my life to this project and I am very good at what I do.

The difference between me and people more successful than me is that they have people working to help them with all of the things that do not require their unique attention. Creative people are only successful when prudent, well organized people allow the creative person to create, to allow his mind to focus on the creative process, to read and think and seek inspiration. To do this, they must ease the burdens of more mundane tasks for him.

I am the only one who can do these shows. Other people can do other shows. Other people can advocate other ideas. But I am the product of this operation, and when I am busy doing non-creative things, the company has less product to sell.

Whatever I am thinking of will come across in my work. If you’ve ever listened to a show when I am talking about wires and servers, you have seen this happen. And while there are people who find that interesting, they are not by any stretch of the imagination a majority of this audience, and far less are they any significant portion of the general population.

I’m over here trying to represent myself in an appellate court proceeding, manage a vast technical infrastructure, maintain a fitness regiment, keep my apartment clean in a shared building where my neighbors are less diligent, manage advertisements, handle business administrative tasks, find a wife, run my social media while people try to censor me, promote the shows, and produce shows three days a week. That’s actually not possible for one man to do. Parts of it always fall behind and when they fall too far behind it gets reflected in the content.

Anything you can do to help me with this will be appreciated. Whether that’s a matter of writing custom code to increase the functionality of my websites, sharing content on social media, or stopping by to aid in mundane household matters, just to illustrate the scope.

Limitless Future Earning Potential

Much of what I am about to get into feeds into the project I described in the piece titled Sustained Action on the Path to Sovereignty. If you want to get a better idea of what I have planned for the future, reading that 20,000 word post will give you a very good idea of the scope. The goal here is not just to increase my popularity and living standards. I want to provide people with high paying jobs that they won’t lose for talking about politics. This begins, but does not end, with the media operations. The media operations are to fund other ventures so we can have diverse revenue streams and employ the widest range of skills so we can vertically integrate supply chains and dominate in the market. Once the market is dominated, dominating in politics becomes a less daunting affair.

While I cannot afford to pay staff right now, these shows have the capacity to make money. I was doing good and getting better every month before everything hit the fan in 2017. My plan when I went to Virginia was to move a guy in with me as soon as I got back, and provide him room and board in exchange for his assistance, with the expectation that his assistance would generate the revenue needed to pay him a salary. That plan got shot full of holes when I lost all my payment processing and ad contracts and social platforms and was bankrupted by lawfare.

There are new opportunities now that did not exist then, I have learned a great deal and had much time to think, and I am working toward realizing the full potential of these new opportunities. If you help me to do this, you can consider it an investment in your future, because I have no intention of making this a selfless activist project. The goal is to be not just self sustaining, but wildly successful.

You think about your input at any place you have ever worked. If you know anything about making payroll, you understand that it is expected for an employee to generate double his pay in revenue for the company. I’ll be happy if you can generate enough to pay yourself, at first, because if we can do that, then things are just going to keep on getting better and better.

I cannot publicly disclose all of my plans, but it may suffice to say that I have plans. Many, many plans. The scope is genuinely enormous, and paying people a salary they can raise a family on is central to the purpose of the enterprise.

Help me make this happen, and you will not be forgotten when things begin paying off.

Managers

I’m going to get into a bunch of different things here with varying levels of trust required, but one of the most urgently needed things is for people to take charge of the projects I’m about to describe. A familiar phenomenon is, people offer to help, but they need direction, and this ends up with me chatting with them all day and night and this is not productive for me or for them.

Ideally, I would have *A* manager, as in, someone to manage me. But I am a rather difficult thing to manage and I have trouble imagining somebody taking on this job without a great deal of money involved up front. This is a job I absolutely intend to hire somebody to do. I already have a candidate in mind and we’ve discussed it, but no ink has yet been spilled on it, so feel free to make your pitch.

In the interim, much of what I am about to get into below would involve collaborative efforts between several people. The person who steps up to take charge of the project and insulate me from all the minutia does me a tremendous service.

Lowest Bar of Entry

For those of you without specialized skills, who do not live in proximity to me and and do not want to sign a non-disclosure agreement, there are obviously limits on what we can do and it is not an effective use of my time to micromanage whatever it is you are doing.

But, entirely on your own, you can;

Share the content on social media.
Talk about the content with other people.
Be a helpful, positive, active participant in our live stream chats and social media comments.
Encourage other content producers to collaborate with me.
Call into the show when it is live, with your thoughts collected, and preferably, a short, written script to begin your call.
Encouraging others to call into the show

If you are willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement

I’ll get more specific in a moment, but if you are willing to identify yourself to me and sign a non-disclosure agreement, this in itself is useful to me and I’d like you to do that as soon as possible, regardless of what else you bring to the table. One of the major challenges I face is that I am bombarded with information from anonymous people and it presents a tremendous cognitive burden to figure out who is a prudent friend, who is a misguided friend, who is an absolute lunatic, and who is a devoted bad actor hell bent on my destruction.

The non-disclosure agreement all but totally eliminates the threat of devoted bad actors. Once there is a sincere potential for legal action, everything changes. A reporter for the New York Times is not going to sign that agreement. Your average Antifa criminal is not going to give up his true identity.

The non-disclosure agreement helps to hasten tremendously, though does not eliminate entirely, the trust building process. It lets you skip to the font of the line in my mind and cuts out a tremendous amount of worrying.

I would like nothing more than to have a Telegram group of people who have all signed my non-disclosure agreement, so that we can discuss possible plans and I can bounce ideas off of more people without disclosing them to the public. You do not necessarily require any special skill to be useful in this capacity, just verify your identity, sign it, and be there for me to talk to and you will have performed a valuable service by this alone.

But of course, there is plenty more this opens the door to.

Strategic Social Media

The best example of how I would put to use people with NDAs even if they don’t have specific technical skills could be described as strategic social media. There are things I’d like to do online that would be ruined if I described them publicly. They require secret planning and we just can’t do that without a level of confidence.

There is some room for this to occur with people who could be verified in some other way as long time listeners, but at a high level I need people I can speak in total confidence with and they are not in great abundance at present.

Donor/Investor Recruitment and Relations

One way you know I’m not greedy is how badly I neglect the people who pay me. I’m only half kidding about this.

There is much that could be done to find new financial support, and also to make existing financial supporters better informed about how much I appreciate their assistance. Unfortunately I cannot say much about this in public, but if you are good with people and you don’t mind asking for money or dealing with rejection, this might be a way that you can help me out very significantly.

It might go without saying that you would have to sign a non-disclosure agreement to know anything about my donors. If you can bring me new donors, I really don’t mind much at all how you go about doing this and I’ll be perfectly happy for you to remain anonymous to me for that purpose.

Text Compilations / Book Projects

I have composed over 9,000 pages of text during my career which I still have available now. There are many hundreds, probably thousands more, residing in the sent folders of my various email accounts. There is a great deal of potential for this, but it requires a lot of time and effort to go through and make useful.

I cannot at this time say much about it publicly, but if you are somebody who enjoys reading my writing, and you can demonstrate your trustworthiness, and you have some skill for editing text, I could definitely use your help.

For somebody who would sign a non-disclosure agreement, you could help me out a great deal by going through my sent emails and finding things worth making use of.

Photoshop / Meme Generators

I used to have some folks who could be described as superfans who made me a legend with some creative image editing and a savvy for what gets shared on social media. If you’ve been around awhile, you remember some of these more notable moments and individuals.

I would very much like to recreate those times, and if you can help, you would be doing me and our cause a great service.

Data Entry

We try to do as much as we can around here with databases and automation, but sometimes there is no better way to do something than to copy paste and type.

As an example, at this moment, we need to input the URLs for all of our MP3 files into the new podcasting system. The only way to do this is to open up each post, and enter the URL to the MP3. This is tedious and time consuming, but not very complicated.

Content Curation / Show Prep

I had set up a Telegram Group called “Cantwell Show Prep” which is now almost completely unused after I went on a tirade therein.

I spend a great deal of time reading the news. Most of it is utter shit and a complete waste of my time.

On other days, I end up pulling up news sites during the show and reading things cold, with mixed results.

What I would ideally like is for a group of people to collaborate on content curation, and one person to interact with me from that group, to provide me with 5-10 stories a day that I know will make good live reads on the show, or which convey to me important information I need to do the show and talk to callers.

I can’t be wasting my time reading everything online or watching the news all day. I need to let my mind focus on whatever my creative impulses require. I also can’t be chatting about the news with a hundred people all day.

I need a team of people finding the best stuff, and one person making the decision about what I get.

That person is going to feel like their efforts are not being valued because a lot of the time I will not read the materials they provide. But the service this person provides is not only that I read the news on the air. They are providing me with the capacity to do the other things I need to do without worrying that I am missing something. That is a very valuable service indeed and I will try to make them know that their services are valued.

Remote Live Show Assistance

There are a few people who hand me helpful information during live broadcasts in private messages. I tend to tune out other messages during live shows.

It would be a best practice for something like this to go on during the show as a collaborative effort, and for me to receive this information through a single channel of communication, rather than getting direct messages, figuring out who sent them, what it is, and then trying to figure out if I should work it into the show.

If several people coordinate in a single Telegram group for example, and then I could devote a screen to them, and by whatever process they figure out, material appears on my screen and I can just read it or play it without devoting the cognitive bandwidth to decision making.

Shorts & Compilations

When I used to be on YouTube, I kept closer watch over my viewing statistics. The difference in view counts between a 3 minute video and a 10 minute video was worlds apart. A two hour production is a very special interest sort of thing. Without YouTube as a promotional tool, I have done less of this, but it’s still worth doing on the platforms I have access to. Uploading short clips to different video platforms will, with 100% certainty, get more people listening to the shows.

Those clips are also useful for putting together “Best of” compilations. I had at one point put together 5 CD length compilations of this type and I was using my 5 disc duplicator to produce them en masse and distribute them as promotional material. If you want to introduce somebody to the Radical Agenda, have them listen to an entire episode with hit or miss calls and live reads of the news is less impactful than giving them a selected compilation of the best parts.

But for me to do this is not a good use of my time. For one, I am terrible at it because I never want to cut anything out. Among my character flaws is an ego that alternates between hating everything I do and thinking that to cut a single syllable is to set the world ablaze. More rationally, with notable exceptions, there is hardly anything worse for a creative person to do than listen to himself talk. This satisfies for me the same urges that cause me to create new material, and I should not satiate those urges in alternative ways.

A listener with zero technical skills can simply note the timestamps in a recording they are listening to anyway. A listener with only slightly more advanced skills can easily edit that audio. Editing video can be done with little in the way of skills but to do it in a time efficient way requires equipment not everyone has access to, namely, a GPU or graphics card.

This would ideally be a collaborative project with several enthusiasts. Whether via a Telegram channel or a forum on the website, it would be beneficial for several listeners to collaborate and determine what segments from the shows should be cut and for listeners with the skills and equipment to make those edits.

This needs to be done for each new show that is produced, as well as for all of the many hundreds of old episodes in the archives. For the new shows, this obviously requires no trust aside from your proven good taste and capacity to work with others, but for the archives I do require a minimum level of trust because I do not want the entire archive floating around anymore. There is a lot of stuff there that I do not stand by and that does not serve my business or our political interests to see distributed without context.

Audio/Video Clip Management

Closely related to show prep and the shorts/compilations work, I have many thousands of audio and video files on my computer which have the potential to make the show much more entertaining but are poorly organized. These things need to be systematically catalogued and made useful.

I have a few applications for this purpose.

One is an application called “Podcast Soundboard” which interacts with a MIDI keyboard I have in the studio. Using this I can pretty easily play sounds during the show and I routinely do, though I have been less “Johnny on the spot” with it than I used to be, having fallen out of practice, and given that I am getting accustomed to a new soundboard.

Among the problems we run into here is that beyond a handful of “drops” I use (or aspire to use) routinely, it becomes difficult to memorize the locations of these sounds and summon them on the spot when context calls for them.

I have another application called MATIC which is very useful. Using this I can have my tablet function as a soundboard, and perform other functions. MATIC runs as a server on the Windows computer I work with during broadcasts, and an app on the tablet interacts with the server. One can create an unlimited number of screens in the MATIC tablet app, and on each screen there are buttons that perform functions. Those functions might be to load a different screen in MATIC, change the scene in my broadcasting app, to play a sound, to load an application, just about anything.

Imagine for example, I have one screen with sounds from Tucker Carlson, and one screen with sounds from Donald Trump. On the main screen I have my scene switcher for the broadcast app and one button that says Trump and one button that says Tucker. I hit the Tucker button, and new buttons appear that play sound clips from Tucker Carlson. At the bottom of the Tucker screen, there is a button to return to the main menu.

This is easy for me to describe, because I have actually already done this, but the screens only have a few sounds on them because populating the screens and choosing the right sounds is a time consuming process.

It would be great if I had screens for AOC, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Joe Kennedy, Ron Paul, Joe Rogan, this list could go on forever, obviously.

The process is not a highly technical one. The interface is relatively intuitive and I could teach my mother to use it. But finding and choosing the clips and organizing them is a slightly artistic process and there is some light audio editing involved.

Closely related, I have an application called Auto Hot Key, which I have not made almost any use of yet, but from my reading of the documentation has the ability to be very useful. This is slightly more complex, since it uses a scripting language, but this eliminates the need for the tablet or the soundboard. The application would listen at all times for a combination of key presses and perform a given action when that key combination occurs, and these can be very complex processes given the scripting language available.

To give you an idea of the application’s complexity using a categorically different example, it can fix common spelling errors independent of application. So if you commonly misspell a word, say you misplace the i and e in “their” frequently, the application will recognize when you hit “t h i e r” it will then automatically enter the keys “SHIFT, LEFT ARROW, LEFT ARROW, LEFT ARROW, LEFT ARROW, LEFT ARROW, BACKSPACE, t, h, e, i, r” instantly, thereby spelling the word correctly without your intervention.

So, it should almost go without saying that it can play an MP3 file if I hit CTRL + ALT 9, or whatever key combination we desire. That is obviously very powerful, but it requires some time and of course since it does not have the benefit of a menu to select from, it would need to be well documented

This collection of clips should be also growing by the day, but I have been less attuned to this task in recent months than I used to be. Especially for those of you who watch a lot of TV or videos, it would be very helpful if you could add to this collection when you hear funny or otherwise interesting things which should be added to the collection.

My Private Audio Recordings

In no uncertain terms, this would require a non-disclosure agreement.

I have hundreds, probably thousands, of hours of audio which nobody has ever heard. I do not even know what is in them. They are files labeled mostly by date. Some of these are very important, most are completely mundane, and others could harm me if they got into the wrong hands.

Without the non-disclosure agreement, I really can’t say anything else about the nature of the recordings, but if you will sign the agreement and on top of this demonstrate that you care about me personally and have my best interests at heart, there’s a really amazing audio journey in it for you and you will be doing me a great service.

Guest Bookings

Both in the context of getting me booked as a guest on other platforms, and getting guests booked for my shows, this role has the potential to really improve things for our efforts. Our most successful episodes of both shows have been episodes with guests who have their own followings, and my appearances on other platforms always bring in new listeners as we are exposed to the larger followings of other producers.

But this is not an easy job.

Not everybody wants to work with me, for one. Many of the people who do not want to work with me, also do not want to be seen as not wanting to work with me, and you will certainly get the run around from people. Others will call you a Nazi scum and hang up the phone on you.

This job involves, above all, dealing with rejection, and that is not easy for most people. Even for those who deal with it well emotionally, there is an added benefit that our production can gain if you are able to overcome rejection. If you have the social skills to win people over, then your capacities applied to this role will empower us tremendously.

On Site Production Assistant

I currently reside in Manchester, New Hampshire and the shows air live from my home. Most successful streamers are not one man operations. They have other people loading clips, changing screens, troubleshooting problems, and all the things you see distracting me from the work of being an engaging host.

Ideally, I would do a lot less keyboard and mouse work while on the air. It would be really nice if I could sit further back from the camera and get all my information from my big screen TV instead of the four monitors that I have to keep an eye on all the time.

This would be very demanding work and it would require a very high level of trust. We’ll talk about some of the specifics below.

Other On Site Work

If you’re somebody who can demonstrate your trustworthiness to me, especially if you are willing to identify yourself and sign an NDA, I’d be interested in getting to know you better.

If you have skills with Windows computers, PC hardware, Linux, audio and video equipment, lighting, even better. If not, I would be willing to teach the right person.

I have a complex professional audio setup here, and sometimes problems with it arise. Troubleshooting can be a time consuming process, and I would love it if I could just have somebody else handle it. If you don’t have those skills but you would like to learn them, you could pick up valuable experience here.

I have several Windows computers here, some of which dual boot to Linux. There are sometimes very low level mundane tasks to be dealt with regarding these computers that can be sort of time consuming and if I could have somebody else deal with them, that would be great. If you do not have those skills but you would like to learn them, you could pick up valuable experience here.

Are you an expert spatial organizer? I am short on space here, and I have trouble keeping things organized. I would love your help.

Have no discernible skills but willing to do mundane errands? Even this I can utilize.

Hell, if you would take my phone out and go do some grinding for me in Pokemon Go, that would actually help me out substantially too.

If you’re nearby, say hi.

Accounting and Financial Consulting, Including Regulatory Compliance

It would not be in our interests to get into detail here, but it may suffice to say that I am no accountant. I do not have the mind for this stuff. I require assistance with this category of challenge.

My financial life was completely ruined by lawfare, and I do not even know where to begin putting it back together. But get it back together I must certainly do, and I will be grateful for qualified assistance.

In addition to my own messes and the general book keeping of a business, an intriguing idea was pitched to me some years ago as a fundraising mechanism, in which rather than to simply solicit donations, one would sell shares in the company. My understanding is, these would constitute securities, and that involves regulatory compliance which I cannot even begin to approach conceptually. But this has the ability to raise significant funds and empower our operations very significantly, so I would welcome qualified assistance regarding this sort of thing.

Advertisement Management

Somebody already reached out to me about this on Telegram and I have to find the conversation to follow up with him. If you are reading, Sir, I haven’t forgotten about you.

I used to bring in a good deal of money from advertisements, but I lost all of those revenue streams when things hit the fan in 2017.

I have been rebuilding those relationships and also working on ways to overcome deplatforming efforts in the ad industry.

Advertising is a major cultural force. It is not just financially useful, it is a political weapon which we would do well to wield more skillfully. I have a wealth of knowledge on this subject, but the process can be tedious and time consuming and I cannot give this its due without it cutting into content.

If you have any experience in this business, I would really love to speak with you. Even for those who do not have experience, I am willing to teach you if you are willing to learn.

Technical Specialty Work

It might be said that your humble correspondent “knows enough to be dangerous” about nearly everything. I am technically inclined. I can understand the basic principles of many programming languages. I used to work in a datacenter, and also for a company that built datacenters and installed security systems. I was a freelance technician who would on one day be building networks for Madison Avenue financial firms, and on the next be helping some grandmother figure out how to video chat with her grandkids. For more than a decade I have (with some assistance) been managing my own servers and my own websites, and during that time I have had to meet the most unique challenges.

Whenever I think of a technical project, it is never a question of whether or not I can do it. I am always 100% certain that I can. The question is, can I devote the time and resources necessary to accomplishing the goal? And the answer to this is often less certain.

All of which is to say, I think of technical solutions to everything, and these are often quite involved. They require either the sort of mind that sits down with a technical manual and learns a skill on the spot, or specialized training and years of experience. Preferably both.

This means the list of projects in my head grows with great rapidity, and always at a greater pace than such projects can be completed. I have built for myself a terrible habit of getting a thing 80% done on my own, and when it reaches a certain level of complexity, placing it on the back burner because to devote my attention to it further would interfere with content production. I am embarrassed to admit this, because as the most competent readers will immediately recognize, 80% completion is the signature of mediocrity.

I need people with the widest variety of skills to bring these projects to completion.

Phones / VoIP / Interfaces

There are several projects related to telephony which are currently little more than ideas in my head. But they have the potential to expand our power greatly if we can get the right people to manage them.

I’d like to start doing robocalls, and also to build the infrastructure for a human operated cold calling business. I would also like to replace the current system I used to take calls during the show.

I recently downloaded and installed FreePBX on one of my spare computers, and though I have lacked the time and cognitive bandwidth, I’ve been looking forward to familiarizing myself with this.

Years ago, I also experimented with something called Vicidial, which is a call center management application that can facilitate robocalls including complex prompts and menus.

I currently pay good money for a premium service to manage calls into the show. It’s worth the money, but I’d be very happy to reduce or eliminate that expense. The guy who runs it is a stand up character who has endured the subpoenas and threatening calls from criminals and activists and he worked with my defense attorneys in my federal case in New Hampshire, and we are still doing business and he still promptly answers my emails, but I always have tremendous anxiety about relying on any third party service given the deplatforming we have endured over the years.

Before I used that service, I used something called Free Conference Pro. This was basically a free conference call service that people would call in, enter a room number to join a conference, and then be put on mute until I unmuted them to take their call. I ended up switching to the premium service when my callers figured out they could unmute themselves and began using this to disrupt the shows.

I can’t say much about the robocalls and cold calling operation right now without giving away strategic information. But, it may suffice to say that I think it has a great deal of potential and if you are suited to the task I would like to discuss the prospects with you.

As for taking calls on the air, the minimum requirements actually are not very involved. It is perfectly sufficient that people can call in, be put in a hold queue, hear the show while on hold, and I take their calls in the order they were received using a web or other interface. I’d need at least 5, preferably 10, call in slots available.

There is no upper limit on how fancy we could make this. Currently the service I use has the caller say a few words which are translated to text using a speech to text engine, and this allows me to get some idea what the caller wants to discuss. I am also given their Caller ID with name, and location, and the system also does a carrier lookup to tell me what provider they are using, although this is imperfect. The carrier lookup was implemented to deal with prank calls coming from VoIP providers.

Ideally, I would have a human call screener. Whether in studio or remote, and they could talk to the caller and interact with me during the show so we could more intelligently plan who goes on the air when and why.

Websites & Servers

I currently have two highly capable people helping me with the websites and the servers. I also acquired a new friend who has offered to consult as needed on some very high level things. I am very grateful for their service. But as you might expect, highly capable people are in very high demand, and thus they are generous to give me a few hours a week of their very valuable time. The rest must be devoted to their families and those who are able to pay them. If we could build a team of people with similar inclinations, this would help to distribute the load and we can hasten the progress on the very grand designs I have for these websites.

My websites consist largely of a great number of WordPress plugins. For experienced developers and server managers, you understand the perils that come with this. I take a great deal of pride in the fact that these websites have never been hacked despite tremendous effort by incredibly determined people. I do not install these things carelessly, I test them in sandboxes, I deploy best security practices, and I do maintain my sites such as by promptly if not automatically installing updates, but they do create performance issues and lead to occasional conflicts.

I am also limited in the way I visually organize these websites to whatever the themes I acquire provide. The idea that I would rearrange them on my own is preposterous to me. When one theme does not provide what I like, I try another, and since I do not have the resources to buy endless premium WordPress themes, I am limited to those I can acquire either for free or through a subscription licensing service I pay for.

Skills that we can instantly deploy in this arena include, but are not limited to

PHP Developers
Database Developers (Specifically MySQL, MariaDB)
WordPress Theme Developers
Expertise in WordPress MultiSite Configurations
WordPress Experts More Broadly, such as plugin development and troubleshooting.
CSS/HTML/JavaScript Development
REST API
Systems Administration
Linux
Docker
CyberPanel
Webmin/Virtualmin
cPanel/WHM/WHMCS
MySQL/MariaDB
PHP (Including custom frameworks like Code Igniter)
Nginx, Apache, LiteSpeed
SMTP/POP3/IMAP – Especially regarding spam filtering and deliverability – (Currently, Postfix, Mail-in-a-Box, Mail Hardener. Looking to set up lists with something like GNU Mailman soon)
Load balancing and redundancy solutions.

Media Servers

Closely related to the above, this operation has an Nginx RTMP relay for video streaming to multiple platforms, as well as two audio distribution servers running IceCast and a radio scheduling application called LibreTime.

Our RTMP relay has some shortcomings, as anybody familiar with the Nginx RTMP module will immediately recognize.

We have an HLS output for embedding video on our sites. We are cognizant at this time that the way we have this set up is suboptimal, but it would not be in our best interests to explain the problem publicly. You may already know just from me saying this much.

The Nginx RTMP module does not support RTMPS, and this means we cannot use it for secure RTMP streams such as to Telegram and Kick.com. We’ve been using a third party service to fcilitate Telegram, but we don’t like relying on third party services for obvious and not so obvious reasons, and the free version of the service limits us to two outputs. I tried to set up Stunnel for this, but kept running into problems and put the project on the back burner. If you can get Stunnel working for me, you’ll immediately expand my reach.

LibreTime is a really great application that populates our Icecast feeds with content 24/7/365. I set two of these up, one for Radical Agenda and one for SurrealPolitiks. They currently run on different VPSs because I thought that would be required of them. I have since become convinced that this is not necessarily the case. These can be run in Docker containers and it would greatly improve our infrastructure. The way it is currently set up is suboptimal, and the version we are running has a bug in which the Celery process does not function and thus it cannot automatically download podcasts from RSS feeds. We need to install the new version to fix this. But there is no automatic update script. It has to be reinstalled, and I’ve been delaying this for months.

We have long had an eye toward hosting our own video on demand, and I’ll talk more in a moment about this under the context of running our own social platforms, but for now it may suffice to note that I’ve had my eye on running Kaltura Community Edition, and I’ve recently begun looking at PeerTube. Much inspiration has derived from Odysee and GoyimTV.

Until we get our revenues up, acquiring the recommended resources for systems like this is going to be cost prohibitive. It seems to me, however, that with a certain degree of skill we could distribute the load across multiple systems. I currently run this operation on a number of discount VPS services which, if you believe the specs, are very attractively priced. But they all typically offer some outsized resource and some constrained resource. For example, lots of disk and not a lot of bandwidth, or vice versa. That’s a thing you can overcome with some scripting, to allocate resources across different systems.

Fully Independent Social and Messaging Platforms

What we have seen with all the independent social media platforms is that they invariably cave to pressure at some point while spouting off about free speech. This is dumb. We need to run our own social media platforms with sane moderation policies that we enforce for our own interests and stop talking about ridiculous concepts like free speech absolutism.

Platforms like Friendica, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Castopod all provide very intriguing options for this in the form of federated social networking platforms.

SurrealPolitiks.com integrates BuddyPress to use social features within the site, and this is being extended out to the broader content network. We use a premium plugin called Better Messages Websocket to facilitate video and voice messaging. I’ve been toying with Youzify to make the profiles more visually appealing and fun to work with.

I currently have a fully functional XMPP server running. I have not attempted to put users on it yet for reasons we’ll discuss later, but it definitely works and I hope to make more use of this by integrating it with other systems.

I also have an UnrealIRCd running with Anope services that facilitates a chat box on all the live video pages on each of my websites.

I’ve done minimal research on the whole “Fediverse” concept, but I think it looks very promising. I’d like to set up test platforms of Friendica, Mstodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Castopod and see what works and how much effort is required to maintain them.

But I don’t have time for this. I would benefit greatly from others taking an interest in this project and dedicating some time to it.

Cross Platform Integration

Tying it all in, the idea of the Content Network that we originally talked about as Realpolitik Right and which is now operating under the SurrealPolitiks branding is quite expansive. We want to provide our subscribers with really unique and expansive benefits that extend beyond our own websites.

The original idea was to have this contained within a WordPress multisite network, wherein a common user database is maintained and access is controlled from the main site. We are already making this happen.

But in the course of this it has occured to us that this presents problems best not described publicly. The better way to handle this would be to offer a Single Sign On service, such as is provided by Google and Facebook, where you are able to use your accounts with them to sign into other websites without entering your password into those other sites.

WordPress has the capacity to do this with their REST API. There are WordPress plugins that facilitate this functionality, but I am not comfortable deploying them myself in a production environment yet because I do not fully understand the technology and when it comes to user data I have to exercise greater caution than when I am toying with less sensitive systems.

I need a genuine expert to handle this and that expert needs to sign an NDA.

Software as a Service (SaaS) Platforms

In Sustained Action I discussed a number of different SaaS applications I had been eying on a market for source code. I already bought one of those applications and it is operating in a test environment.

There are lots and lots of these things available for very reasonable prices. If you want to learn more about them, I suggest you read Sustained Action on the Path to Sovereignty.

As for the volunteer component, what I am hoping for is people who will raise their hand and say “I have the skills and I will take on this project”. I’ll provide the software and the VPS and you do your thing.

Mobile App Development

I am in communication with a Flutter/Dart developer who has offered to consult with me on projects of this nature. I also bought an app template that says it will convert my website to an app, but I am realizing it is more involved than I have time to devote to it.

I want to develop an app for each show, and ultimately for the content network.

They don’t all have to be implemented right away, but among the features I am aiming at are;

Authentication for paywall access using the WordPress API
Chat using XMPP/IRC
Video streaming with HLS
Audio Streaming with Icecast
Podcast and Video on Demand, including paywall content for authenticated users
Social Sharing and Integration
Verified User Badges
GPS Integration for Listener Meetups

Artificial Intelligence

I’ve done a lot of work with Stable Diffusion (image generation) and an application for running Large Language Models (LLMs) called Oogabooga.

This reached a point where to progress further I would have to devote more time to it than I could.

Specifically, I’d like to train the image generators to make good looking representations of me and be able to reliably place them into scenarios described by text prompts. I’d also like to train the LLM with my many thousands of pages of writing, and the thousands of news articles I have bookmarked, and the many books I have read, so I have a text generator that writes and thinks like me.

I would like to make these things available to the public, or at least, to paying subscribers.

Raspberry Pi for Mobile and Set Top Devices
Among our ambitions here is to develop a set top box, similar to a Roku device, for content delivery. This is easy enough to do if the user wants to tinker with their own media players, but we would aspire to have one that boots directly to a custom menu for live and on demand content.

A back of the mind project for your humble correspondent is also to make a deliverable device with a touchscreen to serve as a secure communications device. This would integrate with the aforementioned work on the VoIP projects.

Conclusion

Wow, you’re still reading? Thanks!

These are just some of my current ambitions and ways for you to assist. I certainly have more things than this I would like to do, and I would be happy to have your help. You may have things I haven’t thought of, and provided we can address any security concerns, I’ll be happy to have you lighten my load or increase my power level.

That’s fundamentally the idea here. Lighten my load, or increase my capacities. If you can do either of those things, I will be grateful and I will continue to devote the maximum possible effort toward entertaining audiences and spreading important ideas.

I literally cannot do that on my own. I need your help, and I now thank you for it, in advance.

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