On 28 Apr 2019, at 2:18, Morlock Elloi wrote:
Carpenter was optimist.
More a primitivist, I think, but basically yeah.
Those NYClink monoliths have an odd history that I don't entirely
understand, but very few do. It goes back to the slow abandonment of
phone booths, which in NYC used to have an ATM-like function — not as
contraptions that dispensed cash to users but as cash cows for the small
businesses that owned the ones that weren't in or on physical banks.
Phone booths were similar: prominent locations were owned by Nynex /
Bell Atlantic, the RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Company) spun off when
AT was broken up, but lots were owned and occasionally maintained by
independent businesses. In the late '90s "AT" merged with the mobile
provider Cingular and, as part of a rebranding process, redesigned its
payphones in some ghastly pomo style. But after a city-wide
restructuring of payphone contracts in the late '90s (i.e., under
Giuliani), most of the remaining indy phone booths were bought up by a
privately held 'advertising' company called Titan, which was founded in
2001. Titan let their phones go to hell, but their main aim seems to
have been consolidating the easements that allowed payphones to sit on
properties the company didn't own. Many if not all of the LinkNYC
monoliths make use of those easements now, and they seem to be the
culmination of a pretty long and capital-intensive game plan. There are
also some odd cases where the monoliths have been tactically deployed in
ways that mainly serve to displace pushcart vendors, street used-book
sellers, and the like.
This page preserves some of the transitional 'branding' mutations under
the title "11,000 black holes":
https://archinect.imgix.net/uploads/bl/blughezoztprcgs3.jpg
I remember hearing rumblings that Titan had been quietly installing
network nodes or at least sensors in some of their semi-abandoned pay
phones — say, to test a longer-term business proposition — but I
never looked into it. The video I note below confirms they were doing
just that. But it's worth keeping in mind that this all was happening as
NYC was morphing from a post-'70s drug capital into a more
future-oriented city organized around the threat of terrorism, so these
changes involved lots of moving parts with conflicting interests in
small- and large-scale surveillance systems with different players as
well as players within players (for example, the NYPD's drug-enforcement
hierarchy vs its rising counter-terror forces) — all of which is
totally opaque.
John Young would probably know more about parts of this history, and
Daniel Kahn Gillmor (a/k/a DKG), who's now a senior staff technologist
at the ACLU in NYC, would probably know some other parts. Unfortunately,
I've never run across any publicly minded telecom geeks with a deep
local knowledge of NYC — as in, willing to dive into byzantine city
contracts and policies. But the person who knows most is Dan Doctoroff,
a world-class self-dealer who was Mayor Bloomberg's point man for
infrastructure: he spent much of his time in office trying to marry
post-9/11 rebuilding plans with his NYC2012 Olympic bid and the Hudson
Yards redevelopment project. Titan's various contracts with NYC were
renegotiated while he was in office — I'm sure they made ample use of
the crash of 2008 to 'optimize' their various upstreamd downstream
dealings — and he went on to co-founded the Google venture Sidewalk
Labs, which...wait for it...bought Titan.
There are a few trivial snippets of this history still lying around in
public, mostly related to a public 'Reinvent Payphones challenge' in
2012–13 — proposals by ~architecture firms, the obligatory
warm-fuzzy public-participatory design nonsense, etc:
https://bustler.net/news/2812/six-finalists-of-nyc-s-reinvent-payphones-design-challenge
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/redesign-payphones-design-challenge_n_2828866
https://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/nyc-reinvent-payphones-finalists/
But this page inadvertently calls it:
while all of the proposals suggest that the kiosks will be widely used
for way finding, internet access, phone calls, emergency response and
other relevant pedestrian needs in the 21st century, none go into
quite as much detail as the I/0 proposal by none other than TITAN360.
In case you dont know, Titan360 if an OOH advertising company that has
a huge stake in the phonebooth inventory around NYC, collecting ad
revenue from a lions share of the 11,000 plus remaining booths. They
seem to have taken this contest the most seriously, producing a glossy
5 minute video to explain how I/0 and the average citizen will
interact.They seem to have taken this contest the most seriously,
producing a glossy 5 minute video to explain how I/0 and the average
citizen will interact.
http://daily.publicadcampaign.com/2013/03/reinvent-payphones-design-challenge.html
It includes a
