Thud

I said I was done talking about LinkNYC for a while, but here comes some more. I might repost a version of this to the payphone site next week.

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There I was, dicking around with a kiosk as I am wont to do these days, when I noticed that one of the panels looked loose. It was jiggling in its socket so loosely, in fact, that I thought it was going to disgorge itself from the kiosk. Curious to know if it was as loose as it appeared to be I touched my finger to it, idly pushing at it a little bit. I barely touched it. That was all it took to dislodge this big chunk of the structure and send it crashing to the ground. All I could do was laugh and say, right outloud, “What a piece of crap.”

I don’t know what this component is (backup battery, maybe?) but its removal did not appear to stop the kiosk from working. I thought of attempting to replace it but from the sound and impact of it hitting the ground it seemed too heavy to lift. I feel a little bad for whoever’s job it is to raise this thing and replace it.

For all I have said about my loathing of these kiosks and the Smart City propaganda that informs their existence I wish no harm against the devices or anyone involved with them. I have always eschewed vandalism, even in its most artistic and phony noble intentions. I felt bad enough about so effortlessly pushing this component out of its socket that I considered contacting the kiosk owners to let them know about it, perhaps adding that I barely touched your $50,000 contraption. It looked like it would have come dislodged on its own if a crane dropped a 50,000 pound cement block at a nearby construction site or if the routine earth-shaking rumble of the nearby above ground subway train caused the relatively tiny kiosk to shake itself into oblivion.

It took me some time to consider that the earth-shaking rumbling of the train going past might be a contributing factor to this kiosk’s disintegration, and that the minor earthquake caused by the passing trains is causing the device to gradually shake apart.

I have seen bits and pieces of other kiosks lying around or just missing, adding to my general view that these things are not sleek and meticulously engineered devices but cheap rinky-dink junk ready to fall to pieces if someone nearby sneezes too loudly.

The placement of this and other kiosks near repetitively earth-shaking above ground subway trains is starting to look like another masterpiece of urban planning from the folks at LinkNYC.

Further to all this I sent in email a version of what follows to an old friend who would be interested.

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They said it cannot be done anymore but acting on a hunch I found that you can still access the Internet through those payphone-replacement kiosks. The path to get there is not obvious, and to be honest I think I’m an utter genius for finding this. I did nothing illegal, did not crack any passwords or break into any systems. Going back to my roots my goal is to populate as many screens as I can with this type of thing:

But I also did what I think I had to do. I filled the screens with pornographic movies and images and made video of the porn as it played back on the kiosk screens. There is something guttural and raw in seeing that kind of stuff on the kiosks out there in the open. I can’t say I get any kind of perverted thrill in seeing cocksucking videos out on a city sidewalk as people stroll past. But it is compelling as hell in a “New World Order Gone Wrong” way that I cannot quite define.

But I hesitate to do anything with those videos now that I’ve recorded several of them. I do not want to be labeled a pornographer but I do want to use the videos to make a statement. I consider the kiosks to be vulgar intrusions from Smart City propagandists who have done nothing to prove they are worthy of using a city and its people as material for their beta testing sandbox. To expand and express that feeling of vulgarity I fill the screens with vulgarity itself. For that reason I found the smarmiest, nastiest porn I could find (keeping it legal, of course) including scat videos of people shitting and trannie porn, the latter of which is a whole new world for me.

At this moment, though, I’m just not certain how to execute making that stuff public. I could anonymously tip off some place like Buzzfeed, or I
could anonymously upload it to the Dark Web. Whatever happens I think this would at very least embarrass the folks at who make these horrible kiosks, if not send shockwaves through their whole program.