A stroke of genius had me out on the Links again on this stupid hot day. I have a plan to reverse the tables on these devices, which I have come to loath. It should not take long to implement the groundwork, which will involve a synthesized voice reading off the scary truth about Links, plus some of the requisite hyperbole which seems to be mandatory for this discussion. Actually why not just go with looney hyperbole and bullshit? Links will burn holes into your eyes. Links will sear your retina, and they will burn your teeth. Bones weaken with continued exposure to Links, and the population of New Yorkers with osteoporosis is expected to increase dramatically over the coming years. Physicians already report increased occurences of weakened bone density. Links do more than anonymize and aggregate. CityBridge endeavors nothing less than indexing the air, indexing your thoughts and emotions, which will themselves be made searchable so that advertising revenues will secure the continued existence of Links….
And so on. What I did today was prove the viability of Links as a broadcast platform. The execution of the plan is pretty simple, but would entail a lot of legwork, or else a small army of fellow artists who want to turn Links into reverse propaganda machines. I wonder if I could get a grant for this… Today I had my piano music playlist playing through about a dozen Links. It was not very audible for most of the time. not surprising at all. I only went with the piano music theme on account of a journalist last week asking about my old story about calling a Thone booth in a seedy part of downtown Tampa and playing cassette tapes of my piano playing for whoeverpicked up that phone. I never fully articulated an aesthetic reason for doing this but as a 14 or 15 year old studying classical piano in a part of the country where boys didn’t do that so much I must have thought I was bringing some class and culture to the riff raff of Kennedy Boulevard. That anecdote would be at the beginning of my book, which is at about 13,000 words. Anyway, in exploring Links as broadcast platfoorms I naturally gravitated to using piano music as content, but reailty says that it makes little sense aurally. A spoken drone robot voice reading apocalyptic predictions about the future of Links and the fatalities they will cause sounds more engaging, and my technique for pulling this off is, while not exactly genius, pretty fucking clever, I think — this would be especially true if I can more or less guarantee that Citybridge cannot prevent me from doing it without specifically targeting me or tracking my usage of these things.
I’ve really come to hate those things. There are just so freakin’ many of them and, in their quantity I find them uglier and uglier, not just on aesthetic appearances but on their meaning. It’s a stampede of monetization, our very realities being indexed and aggregated. I remember joking to someone years ago that the searchies are going to run out of content to index, and they will move on to indexing our brains, our consciousnesses, and even the air we breath. Anything is worth doing in this realm if you can slap ads on it.
And then there is Emma. I don’t know Emma but we crossed paths on the LinkNYC’s Facebook page. I wish so badly I had taken a screenshot of this conversation. I don’t remember what the Link folks posted but whatever it was earned a response from Emma. Her commetns addressed the Links free phone calls, which I’ve discussed in other places, and which I also questioned the Links folks about. Call quality on these links is laughably bad. The praises of Links’ free phone calls seem to be sung loudest by those have never used it. Emma actually used this feature. On Links’ Facebook page she asked, in substance, why functional pay telephones were being routed and replaced with devices offering patently inferior call quality. I commented on her question, concuring on her sentiment. indeed, I would have more confidence in a couple of tin cans and some string as a backup telephone should my cell phone become useless.
The question was not only left unanswered, it was deleted from the page. I probably should not be surprised but it was a pretty rude way to handle the situation. I wrote to Emma to ask if she ever got a response, but she never replied, and she probably never saw my message because of how Facebook segregates messages from people you do not know.
…
Blhablahblah. hot as ass out today. Therapist says I should get a full body profile from a dermatolagist. I’ve essentially never seen a dermo… how the fuck do you spell that… I only went to one Dr. Parriss when I had a fungus infection. That was beautiful, giant ever-growing black splotch taking over my left arm. He gave me some cream and it disappeared completely. I have pictures somewhere of that splotch, which really looked like something from a horror flick. But I’ve never worn sunscreen, so maybe I should see if skin cancer will get me before anything else. I seem to remember my dad getting some potentially cancerous boil lanced off, and he blamed it on all that tropical Florida sun. The sun here just never seems as harsh as in Florida, except for days like these. I noticed on the subway platform yesterday that everyone but me was standing under the covered roof area. I was the only person in the sun. Actually I was in the shade. You can stand in the shade of the light posts on the 36th Ave subway station.
I need another shower.
