This essay places the recently established low-power FM radio service (LPFM) into its historical context to examine the conditions of its emergence and the formative pressures and imperatives that shaped it in many ways contrary to its foundational goals. Established in 2000 as a locally controlled service responsive to local communities, political, economic, and regulatory limits and pressures have rationalized LPFM, diluting much of its potential in order to safeguard the current and future fortunes of the radio broadcast industry. While perhaps successfully contained in the short term, the case of LPFM remains noteworthy for continuing longstanding efforts at creating alternative organizations of communication, as well as for emphasizing how rationalization itself is not an iron-clad logic of modernity beyond human praxis, but a site of struggle in a "long revolution"" for democratic communication and society."