Just a Quarter of New York’s Wi-Fi Kiosks Are Up. Guess Where.

I am not surprised.

VIA: The NY Times

When New York City announced in 2014 that a private company would replace pay phones with thousands of kiosks offering free Wi-Fi, Mayor Bill de Blasio called it “a critical step toward a more equal, open, and connected city.” More [HERE]

Payphone-Replacing LinkNYC Kiosks Not Generating Projected Revenue

Intersection seems to be loosing money on their LINK NYC project by failing to meet projected ad revenue targets and essentially having to pay the city to operate a public infrastructure. This yearly loss doesn't even account the initial installation cost of development and hardware. It would seem like this business deal was a bad idea. And yet, Intersection continues to rapidly expand into other markets like London, Newark, and Philadelphia. What this article fails to mention is LINK NYC was never about the ad revenue but rather the data collection and Google's long term interest in harvesting the digital exhaust produced by cities. New York and most other cities aren't foolish enough to go all Quayside and render Google ground up control, so Intersection is going at it piecemeal. If the LINK NYC towers loose a few million on advertising, that is a small price to pay for the access to NYC's streets and the behavioral data that can be collected at scale with such a massive public infrastructure deployment. And dont think that traditional advertising is the only revenue source. The sale and use of behavioral data is incredibly lucrative and probably the main source of projected income as traditional forms of consumer manipulation give way to softer forms of quiet influence that leave us wanting without a clue where the wanting came from.

VIA: Gotham Gazette

During a February 2016 press conference, Mayor Bill de Blasio made the first phone call on New York City’s first LinkNYC kiosk, stationed at the corner of 16th Street and 3rd Avenue. “It will be the biggest and fastest network in the world, and completely free of charge. And one thing I know about my fellow New Yorkers, they like things that are free of charge," said de Blasio. More [HERE]

A Mess on the Sidewalk

When traditional outdoor ads were replaced with screens I bemoaned the upgrade as a more insidious distraction that was simply harder to ignore as our brains trained our eyes on thier movement. When LinkNYC went in on the streets of NYC, I thought that it would be another opportunity for more distraction but that at least it would come with a touchpad and free phone calls. What has become clear in the first years of LINK's deployment is that is has no interest in traditional advertising whatsoever. Made up of #artonlink and "fun facts" about NYC, the majority of content displayed is a benign sedative obscuring the less obvious data collection practices being employed. No longer is the material of persuasion a physical image designed to cause some affect, but rather the collection of your data which can be used to more subtlety influence who you are and what you want. We are entering a fantastically dystopian era where the tools of persuasion go "underground" and we are all left wondering why we want a Coke so bad even though we haven't seen the curly font on a bright red background for years. 

VIA: The Baffler

WHEN SIDEWALK LABS, a “smart cities” start-up launched by Google, made its Toronto debut in October 2017, a torrent of global adulation followed. Over the next few weeks, Sidewalk choreographed events featuring luminaries such as former Google chairman Eric Schmidt and Sidewalk founder and CEO Dan Doctoroff. There was even a cameo appearance from Canada’s hipster prime minister Justin Trudeau, whose Liberal government is investing heavily to attract innovation-driven companies to Canada. More [HERE]

GOOGLE’S SIDEWALK LABS PLANS TO PACKAGE AND SELL LOCATION DATA ON MILLIONS OF CELLPHONES

As an anti-advertising activist I am becoming more and more aware that the quaint methods once employed by the attention industry are becoming obsolete. In NYC the phonebooth infrastructure, once a ubiquitous form of street furniture across the five boroughs, is rapidly being replaced by digital WiFi stations. While these digital structures do have screens on either side that show advertisements intermittently between more benign content like PSA's, "public art" and fun facts about the city we live in, they are a trojan horse. If the objective of advertising is to influence your behavior, the old method of putting a picture in front of you is costly, cumbersome and largely ineffective when weighed against the capabilities made available through the tracking of our bodily motions and online behaviors. Surveillance capitalism is quickly replacing the old forms of influence with new far more insidious methods unknown and unseen to most of us. As I grapple what that means for my practice as an artist I will continue to report on new ideas and methods being developed to influence our behavior that fall outside of the typical advertising in public space dilemma.

VIA: The Intercept

MOST OF THE data collected by urban planners is messy, complex, and difficult to represent. It looks nothing like the smooth graphs and clean charts of city life in urban simulator games like “SimCity.” A new initiative from Sidewalk Labs, the city-building subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has set out to change that. More [HERE]

NYC Kiosks Invite Artists to Pay Nearly $1,000 to Show Their Work

Another Pay to Play Opportunity for Art in Public Spaces. RJ Rushmore of AiAP writes for Hyperallergic about the New MVOV campaign on LINK NYC.

RJ does as a great job calling out MVOV and the absurdity of paying a gatekeeper to use our shared public spaces. Often the inclusion of art into the commercial space that we call public space is an opportunity for some commercial enterprise and this example is not different. Usually art and artists are used to give respectability to public space land grabs by consumerist ideologies but this example is just straight profiteering. You want to see your work in public space? Do like the rest of us and pay up.

LinkNYC, the “communications network” of digital advertising displays disguised as WiFi hotspots on New York City streets, has gotten into the artwashing game. Artists are being asked to pay to play in what is marketed as an open call for art in public space. More [HERE]

LinkNYC Improves Privacy Policy, Yet Problems Remain

Since first appearing on the streets of New York City in 2016, LinkNYC’s free public Wi-Fi kiosks have prompted controversy. The initial version of the kiosks’ privacy policy was particularly invasive: it allowed for LinkNYC to store personal browser history, time spent on a particular website, and lacked clarity about how LinkNYC would handle government demands for user data, among others issues. While CityBridge, the private consortium administering the network, has thankfully incorporated welcome changes to its use policy, several problems unfortunately remain.

More [HERE]

Aiming to Disrupt Ads in New York City, Artworks Instead Blend In

My criticism of this project was announced by my questioning of the curators at a recent panel at the New School in NYC. Basically I was concerned that this type of project, while attempting to disrupt the ad cycle that so clearly has a strangle hold on our collective attention in public space, only further institutionalizes the infrastructure through which we receive this bombardment into the fabric of our city. What is passed off as critique is actually a deeply disturbing acceptance of our inability to imagine alternative visions of society through art. As if a colorful non-commercial image thrown into an onslaught of commercial media could somehow challenge the medium itself and help us to breath new life into a system that is normalizing consumptive behaviors that are at the heart of social and environmental issues we all face. 

VIA: Hyperallergic

The idea behind Commercial Break — an exhibition produced by Public Art Fund (PAF) of 23 artists’ versions of visual “interruptions within the advertising cycles” on some of New York City’s most public screens — seems like a good one. The artist list is appealingly international, including Cory Arcangel, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Martine Syms, Hayal Pozanti, Cécile B. Evans, Tabor Robak, and Mary Reid Kelley. The project looks to inject an aesthetic time-out into the onslaught of commercial images meant to sell us new and improved versions of ourselves. It’s important that the work is being shown in public, because certainly more than languages, professions, or nationalities, New Yorkers share a familiarity with the discourse of advertising. It is merciless in its attempt to convince viewers of their own lack and of their need to buy their way out of the hole. More [HERE]

New Yorkers Greet the Arrival of Wi-Fi Kiosks With Panic, Skepticism and Relief

VIA: The New York Times

When it comes to acceptance of New York City’s rapidly growing network of sidewalk kiosks offering “free super fast Wi-Fi,” some people are Nekeya Browns and some are Alex Padillas. More [HERE]

Google Is Transforming NYC's Payphones Into a 'Personalized Propaganda Engine'

VIA: The Village Voice

At six-five, Bill de Blasio is usually considerably taller than his conversation partners. But on a cold day in February, the mayor of New York City was on the corner of Third Avenue and 16th Street, interfacing with a nine-and-a-half-foot-tall slab, all sleek curves of metal and glass, that had recently appeared on the sidewalk outside the Mariella Pizza shop. The mayor was testing the monolith's local expertise — did it know the location of the pre-kindergarten program nearest to his Park Slope home? The machine passed the quiz, and, the mayoral mugging concluded, de Blasio turned to the microphone. More [HERE]

NYCLU Demands Tighter Privacy Protections For City's Public Wifi

I have some pretty serious reservations about the LinkNYC system that outpace my love of free WiFi and cell phone charging. They arent new concerns but ones brought into astral focus once you realize what type of data 7500 well placed tracking devices can produce in NYC. As 2d static advertising goes the way of the dinosaur and digital begins to take its place, data protection will become almost as important as trying to remain outside of advertisings influence as it will allow more insidious advertising to worm further inside the brains of even the most adamantly anti advertising of us all. 

VIA: Gothamist

Civil libertarians are pushing the city to make its new public wifi kiosk network less data-mine-y, saying that the way the LinkNYC public wifi system is set up now allows for the creation of a database of all users' web activity that the NYPD could easily tap into if it felt like it. More [HERE]

LinkNYC's free gigabit WiFi officially launches, we go hands-on

This isn't directly outdoor advertising related but I think its worth knowing about regardless. LinkNYC is in the process of rapidly replacing NYC's phonebooths with thier own street furniture that will bring incredibly fast free wifi, amongst other things. Having spoken to the CTO, I know the motivation behind this infrastructure initiative is being done with NYC's best interest in mind and the benefits to the average citizen will be widespread. Thought like all public infrastructure these days, the funding to make this initiative viable will come from advertising. One can only hope that because the advertising will be piped in via a digital screen, some of that real estate will make it back into the hands of the public whose ever present gaze is what makes this revenue stream viable in the first place. 

VIA: Engadget

A month ago, we were hot on LinkNYC's free gigabit WiFi hotspots when they kicked off beta testing. Today, the organization is officially launching its payphone replacement hotspots (or Links, for short) --- and with that, it's turning on their integrated tablets for the first time. That means you'll be able to do a lot more than just tap into blazing fast WiFi from the Links. You can also browse the web, get directions with Google Maps, and make free VoIP calls to anywhere in America. After testing out one of the tablets briefly, I can say one thing for sure: New Yorkers won't miss their dirty old payphones at all. More [HERE]

New Yorkers to soon get ‘super-fast,’ free public Wi-Fi throughout the city

Link NYC is rolling out as we speak and bringing super fast WiFi, plus free calls and phone charging, along with other bells and whistles to NYC in 2016. The new units will replace the old phone booth infrastructure that has become so outdated over the past 5-10 years, bringing a refreshed look to the streets along with all of that high tech. I must say I am quite excited to see these units up and running in the same way people must have been excited to see phones being placed on the street, whenever that was. Unlike the phone booths in NYC, running these digital kiosks will not be free and to offset the cost of installation and upkeep, LinkNYC will be running digital video and still ads. There is talk of renewed OOH business models which will make the advertising more local, allow smaller businesses to participate and generally make these kiosks less obtrusive than thier older counterparts, but I remain skeptical. Only time will tell. 

VIA: Metro NYC

One New York company is hoping to link the city that never sleeps to a level of connectivity never done before — and all for free. More [HERE]