Sooo, it’s been an eventful few days around here, though none of the possibly millions of people bewildered by my project this week have any idea who is doing it, or why. Some people seem to seriously think it is Banksy. The æsthetics of confusion are beautiful to me, as are other aspects of the pursuit.
But I have to be serious, because I do not consider this to be a prank, though I can see where others might make that assessment.
Walking around today I asked myself what I’ve been asking for a while: What are my goals in this? What goals are realistic and which ones are not. I am not trying to be an asshole by blasting loud music through these things but the appearance or perception that I am will have to be collateral damage.
A realistic goal in all this is to get them to disable the kiosks’ phone call function, because it is crap, and retain a quantity of traditional pay telephones that are free to use for local calls, or even for nationwide calls if a reliable, blackout-ready VOIP solution could be implemented. The plan to replace every single payphone (and supplement them with thousands of additional Link kiosks) never made any damn sense to me. The folks at InLinkUK are planting significantly fewer kiosks around London, seeming to indicate they have learned from LinkNYC’s mistake — something LinkNYC itself seems incapable of. Every neighborhood should be like West End Avenue, with a quantity of free public telephones, even with phone booths if someone at Intersection can make a better effort at finding genuine American Airlight models. They might try something creative, like searching eBay.
Alright, distracted and filling in other things.
