Why We Don't Trust the FCC (or the FTC, or the IEEE)

Members ask me, sometimes, why the co-op does not seek FCC certification. Or FTC approval. Or IEEE compliance. The assumption is that we simply have not gotten around to it. The truth is that we have decided, deliberately and unanimously, not to.

A certification is a promise of sameness. It says: this signal behaves like every other certified signal. Interchangeable. Predictable. Scalable. These are the values of the industrial signal. They are not the values of the co-op.

I spent ten years inside a conventional telecom, watching certifications shape signal design from the inside. Every rule added another layer of sameness. Every approval smoothed out another rough edge. By the time a signal reached a member, it had been filed down, homogenized, and stripped of whatever made it local.

The co-op has refused thirty-one industry certifications and counting. We keep a list in the barn. We read it aloud at the annual harvest supper. It is not a list of failures. It is a list of choices.

We do not ask members to share our suspicions. We simply ask that they notice the difference, and decide for themselves whose judgment to trust: a committee of engineers in a conference room, or a farmer who has been in the pasture since before dawn.