They do things differently in the UK when it comes to InLinkUK, their Smart City machines made by the same folks that gave us LinkNYC. According to SmartCitiesWorld.net and other sources InLinkUK and British Telephone (BT) have developed an algorithm to detect and disable what they call “anti-social” calls, a term  for calls made to or by drug dealers and other social miscreants. By monitoring only metadata of calls, not the audio content of the calls themselves, BT can now say that drug-related calls made from InLinkUK kiosks represent about 0.5% of all calls made through the machines. The phone numbers dialed in that 0.5% of calls are now blocked. Poof, that’s the end of drug dealing in the UK.

This brings an approach to squelching drug dealing that stands to be about as effective as NYNEX’s attempt in 1994, when touchtone payphones in New York’s drug hotspots were retrofitted with rotary dialers, making it impossible for dealers (or anyone else) to access their voicemail. I wrote a little bit about the rotary revival of 1994 near the end of this story: Was This the Last Working Rotary Dial Payphone In New York City?

If LinkNYC and/or RingCentral have any kind of drug-dealer-detection algorithm in place they’ve kept mum about it. But then it is not publicly known if drug dealing or other social ills represent as big a problem for LinkNYC as InLinkUK. Whatever the case it’s worth remembering that Smart City kiosks merely provide a fresh conduit for an ageless problem. InLinkUK did not give birth to drug dealing any more than LinkNYC kiosks spawned public masturbation.

I’ll give BT a benefit of the doubt about the effectiveness of their metadata analysis. They are a phone company, after all, with uniquely discreet access to suspicious call patterns and such. They would not share details of how their algorithm works, for obvious reasons.

Whatever its merits or privacy implications the relatively proactive InLinkUK approach could not differ more from how LinkNYC dealt with my “anti-social” calling spree last year. Instead of ever even proposing a proactive approach to containing what LinkNYC once described as my “nuisance” calls they instead just had to sit and wait until 30,000 people saw video of my work on Twitter, then publicly ask whoever posted such videos to pretty please tell them the location of the machine making the noise. From their Smart City bunker at Hudson Yards they could access call records from that machine and take a guess at which number I had dialed. They then blocked outgoing calls to that phone number, continuing what became nothing more than a summer-long game of Whack-a-Mole. All I had to do was provision a new number, a process which took about a minute, and the broadcasts resumed.

Every time I discovered they had blocked my number I smiled and waved at one of the surveillance cameras. I may never enter the very selective pantheon of those whose existence LinkNYC or the Smart City will so much as acknowledge. But if I made contact with them through those cameras then I will take some satisfaction in believing that someone besides me get a laugh out of all that.

As I lit up kiosk after kiosk last year with obnoxiously loud ice cream jingles and other pieces of street theater I thought about ways LinkNYC could contain something like this. They could monitor their network for a flood of outgoing calls to the same phone number. Usually when I lit up the kiosks with noise and music I called a single number, often in a relatively obscure area code assigned to rural North Dakota or Minnesota.

But that kind of monitoring, if automated, might result in blocking the thousands of calls they claim go to the EBT food stamps hotline or other legitimate resources. The kiosks also remain plagued with the matter of calls that look like they connected but never actually did. This has afflicted LinkNYC machines since day 1. When this happens a natural reaction is to dial the number again, and again, and again. This might light up an algorithm looking to block repeat calls to the same number.

But even if they had that kind of monitoring ability (and the desire to utilize it) I could have slipped under its radar. I did not have to use the same number for every call. Somewhere in my clutches I have a printout listing hundreds of access numbers I could have used to dial in to the same recording. So many faults and vulnerabilities inhabit those Smart City machines.

In the end I concluded that the only way to prevent someone from blasting noises out of those machines is to disable the loudspeaker and install what the phone calling feature so badly needs: a physical handset. One of the two USB ports could be sacrificed as a charger and have a handset connected to it instead.

Any impetus for LinkNYC to address the matter of my shenanigan had to be weakened by the scope of it all. Social media made my exploit look like a much bigger deal than it really was, and I would assume LinkNYC knew that. But imagine if I had a posse of dozens of people making these calls all over town, 24 hours a day, a small army I vaguely fantasized about recruiting. I did have a small posse, and a few dozen people in the know kept it on the lowdown that I was the one making all the noise. But I just don’t have the personality to recruit fellow anarchists for something like this.

I had not thought much about my Summer of Softee for a while. I can change my mind about the shenanigan multiple times in a single thought, from thinking it childish and idiotic to considering it a legitimate artistic statement by turning those unwanted, unasked for machines into irritants. Then I remember how beautiful it sounded, and how electrified I felt bringing this kind of stop-in-your-tracks street theater to a baffled and random array of New Yorkers. I felt like a ghost. Invisible, but present. I never felt so connected to the streets of New York, and I think I came to understand the physical nuances of those machines better than the people who made them.