| tbyfield on Mon, 29 Apr 2019 17:23:12 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> infrastructural interventions |
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&T was broken up, but lots were owned and occasionally maintained by independent businesses. In the late '90s "AT&T" 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.jpgI 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.htmlIt includes a 5-minute promo video that, amidst the usual 'smart cities' utopian dross, makes it clear that Titan+ got the contract and then, instead of actually building what it proposed, cannibalized the other entries into what became the LinkNYC monoliths — a signature Doctoroff deal. I doubt the activists who are challenging Sidewalk's move on Toronto have paid much attention to this history, but they seem to be catching on:
https://twitter.com/civictechguide/status/1122812893119045632And for some local color, the last proper phone booths in NYC are more or less in my (and John Young's) neighborhood:
http://www.scoutingny.com/the-last-phone-booth-in-new-york-city/ Cheers, Ted # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: