Alright, fine. You got me.
I wasn’t going to say anything, but after all these years, it’s time to come clean. Yes, I was behind the Max Headroom Incident of 1986.
For decades, the world has speculated about who hijacked two Chicago television stations that night—WGN-TV and WTTW—interrupting regular programming with a bizarre masked figure spouting cryptic nonsense while being attacked by an offscreen individual with a flyswatter. Theories ranged from rogue hackers to rogue broadcast engineers to, I don’t know, aliens?
But no. It was me.
HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN
Picture it: Chicago, 1986. Big hair, neon lights, and radio was still a force to be reckoned with. But TV? TV had gotten too powerful. It was all “professionalism” this and “high production values” that. There was no room for true broadcast anarchy.
So, like any rational radio afficionado (even though Genesis Radio technically didn’t exist yet, but time is a construct), I decided to level the playing field.
I gathered some very questionable broadcasting equipment, a handful of VHS tapes, and a lot of caffeine. I recruited an accomplice—who shall remain nameless, mostly because I forgot his real name and only knew him as “Weird Dave”—and we found a way to override Chicago’s major TV signals.
And thus, the greatest unsolved media hijacking in history was born.
WHY MAX HEADROOM?
Look, the guy was already weird. The 80s were obsessed with him. He was a glitchy, AI-generated TV personality before AI was even a thing. He was ripe for disruption.
So naturally, I put on a homemade Max Headroom mask, talked in barely coherent riddles, referenced Coca-Cola in ways that probably got me on a watchlist, and threw in some cryptic nonsense about Chuck Swirsky (who I still have nothing against, for the record).
Then came the flyswatter bit. That was Weird Dave’s idea. I still don’t fully understand why he thought that would be the perfect finale, but at that point, we were flying high on stolen TV signals and bad decisions.
THE AFTERMATH: HOW I GOT AWAY WITH IT
First of all, we did not expect it to work. Seriously. We thought maybe a few people would see some static, maybe a flicker, and that would be it.
Instead, it became a legend. News stations covered it. The FCC got involved. People were obsessed with figuring out who did it.
The authorities looked for “elite hackers.” They thought it was some kind of sophisticated cybercrime operation. But in reality? It was just me, Weird Dave, and some repurposed radio equipment held together with duct tape and spite.
For years, I kept quiet. But now? I run Genesis Radio—the most disruptive, anti-corporate, anti-algorithmic radio station on the internet. And if I could pull off the Max Headroom hijack in 1986, what makes you think I wouldn’t still be up to something now?
I’m just saying… if your smart speaker ever randomly starts playing Genesis Radio, don’t ask how.
You already know the answer.
