The kiosk nonsense has moved on to a new level, I think, one which almost makes me feel like I am in the office with the people behind them. I don’t know if they see Twitter the same way I do, but the avalanche of tweets and retweets about the jingle appear to have engulfed anything else anyone might have to say about the kiosks, and the company’s Twitter feed has gone silent. Of course it’s a holiday week but I know they are there. I honestly hope no one gets fired over this. That’s something I had not considered until recently. They are lucky I’m not an asshole, and for more reasons than one. As part of their “investigation” into what the hell is going on here they took the Perry Mason step of calling the phone number I’ve been using, after procuring it from the kiosks’ call records. They do realize, I have to assume, that in doing this they have delivered to me their telephone numbers and full names? I looked up a few of them and found that it seemed to be PR people, but even someone from Vonage called the number. I’ve been shaking my head about this since Tuesday.
I am also surprised as hell to see that someone at the company claimed their kiosks are impenetrable to hackers. Nobody should believe that, and no responsible technology company would make such a claim, which essentially amounts to a challenge for the hacker world.
So what did the folks at the company they hear when they called the number? Well, nothing. The Magic Minute, which I consider the real cock and balls of this little disruption, comes through again, but in a way I had not anticipated. There were calls from 9 or 10 people at the company and none of them stayed connected for more than a minute. Had they stayed connected after that minute of silence they would have heard the jingle. So at this point neither they nor anyone else I’ve seen write about it really knows exactly what the hell is going on here, and while that is a beautiful thing for me I’m not going to let its practical relevance get blown out of proportion. I mean whether they understand every last nuance of how this is happening doesn’t really matter, although it fuels peoples’ imaginations into thinking this might be something more sinister than it is.
But that lack of fully knowing how this is being done also reduces the public’s ability to understand or comment on the futility of the company’s retaliation. All they seem able to do is block the numbers I call. They must be aware that the quantity of numbers at my disposal may as well be infinite, right? Their additional response has been to limit call duration, a move which has absolutely no impact on what I am doing. I think punishes anyone else who might use these things legitimately. But then again, 10 minutes for a free phone call doesn’t seem entirely unreasonable. More to the point, though, is the fact that the ephemeral nature of the project has always dictated that calls are short. That’s because people are not stupid, as much as the Smart City likes to assume otherwise. When noise starts coming out of these things people’s instincts are to start hitting buttons or looking for ways to shut it off, and I find this is true regardless of whether someone knows it’s a phone call or has any idea of exactly why the noise is happening.
I read a lot of comments and find they all seem to settle into a more or less positive consensus, that this is an epic troll but it’s a good-natured thing where no one gets hurt and no property is damaged. That has always been my philosophy with this kind of thing, as I generally eschew vandalism in any form, with the possible exception of PRAY in New York and ETERNITY in Australia.
But one comment, I suspect, echoes a potential escalation that is probably being discussed at the company. If it is not being discussed it absolutely should be. That escalation would be the inevitable copycats, and what type of content they intend to blast out of these devices. Spewing obscenities, pornographic sounds, political propaganda… it could all be coming soon to a kiosk near you, but if it does it will not originate from me. If the company is not looking forward to that inevitability then they should be.
What could be done to control this kind of thing? I think the calls and maybe even access to other content on the devices could be controlled by requiring some kind of registration. Maybe free phone calls could be a perk of having an IDNYC card, or any other kind of identification. I don’t see why a free service like this should come with zero accountability any more than borrowing a book from the library. So to access the phone feature you somehow register, either by punching in the ID # (which is quite lengthy on IDNYC cards) or else make it possible to get a photo of the card with one of the multiple surveillance cameras that so far seem to be doing nothing useful. Something like this might not work for tourists, for whom some other simple means of obtaining an account number or access code could be arranged. But whatever the logistics I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect some form of identification for access to something like this, and it would allow the company to disable accounts for assholes like me. There would, of course, be ways to get around the system with fake IDs and whatnot but I don’t know if these devices’ loudspeakers are a desirable enough target for that kind of scheming. Hell, maybe they are.
Other options are to either add some kind of handset to the devices or shut off the phone calls altogether, and if the company’s past responses to this kind of “abuse” are any indication I think that is exactly what they will do. That would be very unfortunate, but if it forces them to save a quantity of working landline payphones then I think it’s all good, and I’d be proud to have had a role in saving the payphones in New York. There is no good reason why West End Avenue should be the only place in town where payphones remain available — I don’t even care about the phone booths. The company claiming that they saved them for historical merits was nothing more than a gawky attempt at a publicity stunt. They are not even American model phone booths! All parts of New York should be blessed with a quantity of working payphones that allow for free local calls and paid long distance. Or, if a blackout-ready VOIP solution can be arrived at then maybe make all calls free nationwide. Whatever the case something has to be done about that phone call feature, because it is crap on almost every level.
OK, then, on with my day. I had a near panic attack yesterday but it receded on its own. I woke up to a message from someone saying she had a dream in which I had been murdered and everyone was trying to trace my last steps and figure out what happened. That was strange. I had just woken up from my own complicated dream where I was in a boathouse where fistfights were raging and on account of that I was trying to get out of the place. I slid down a ladder made of thick rope and found myself in a tangle of vehicular traffic that was jammed partly because many of the cars were abandoned. So I got into one such car and in so doing helped relieve the traffic congestion. I found myself on a bridge or overpass that looked down onto someone who I had only heard of as legend but had never seen. He ran a payphone farm, or shop, I’m not sure which, where he serviced and restored just about anything so that it bore resemblance to a payphone. Cars, furniture, even people’s hair and body parts could be crafted to look like a payphone at the hands of this master.
