It has been a couple of years since CityBridge commenced its raid of New York City’s sidewalks with its so-called “payphone of the future”, the 10-foot tall electronic billboard monoliths known as LinkNYC.

The LinkNYC platform is, first and foremost, an advertising platform.

But the kiosks also offer a number of public amenities, such as free phone calls within the U.S., MTA transit updates, maps to tell you where you are, the time of day, etc. LinkNYC’s signature feature would seem to be its blazing fast free Wi-Fi. In my admittedly limited experience (with a less than bleeding edge tablet) it was not especially fast, nor was it reliable. I have not made use of the Wi-Fi since early in 2016, soon after the kiosks first appeared on Third Avenue in Manhattan. I do not intend to make future use of LinkNYC’s free Wi-Fi.

I wanted to be a fan of LinkNYC. Really, I did. But I have come to loath these things. This loss of sympathy does not exactly compare to LBJ losing Cronkite but given my connection to the world of payphones and my personal connection to the livelihoods wiped out by the LinkNYC monopoly it is enduring enough of an issue for me that I thought I should write about it again. I did not think I would.

Many of the LinkNYC kiosks simply Do Not Work™. In their uselessness they lurk ugly as hell, ingrown toenails on the city’s streets. Countless kiosks, once erected, stand idle for months. This useless slab has inhabited its spot (COMING SOON!) since October but I have seen other LinkNYC middle fingers stand dark like this for far longer.

CityBridge has claimed the kiosks are maintained twice a week. Maybe I do not understand what “maintenance” means but if it includes making sure the kiosks are in proper working order then I find it hard to believe these things are checked in on twice weekly. If so then they are not being maintained very well. I and others on social media have seen screens, reserved for advertisements and twee factoids, instead pouring oceans of Linux text matter 24 hours a day for weeks on end.

Another #LinkNYC endless bootup lightshow, this with a subtle seasonal Christmasy color splotches. pic.twitter.com/cUH1QG7ATE

— Payphone Project (@payphonenews) November 28, 2017

Another glitch I have not noticed lately but which was showing up all over town for a couple of months was this seizure-inducing spectacle that looked like something from a discotech lightshow gone wrong. Imagine living with this right outside your living room window:

Another #LinkNYC psychedelic lightshow. pic.twitter.com/fjLzwdCmYX

— Payphone Project (@payphonenews) October 25, 2017

Any time I see one of these bugged out LinkNYC advertising panels all I can think is this is such an obvious thing to have not happen, and that the network must be designed so the kiosks cannot be remotely rebooted or even monitored for functionality.

Other lasting problems with the kiosks include touchscreens that don’t work, calls that never connect, screeching sounds inexplicably blaring from the loudspeakers, advertising screens that show no ads, etc. If you are sitting in your Hudson Yards CityBridge offices you know exactly what I am talking about.

I could go on but enough about LinkNYC’s rinky-dink hardware and software. What about LinkNYC’s feel-good Smart City amenities and social services that are alleged to level the playing field between the rich who created these things and the poor who cannot access the Internet at anything but GIGABIT speeds?

At present CityBridge claims New Yorkers can register for health insurance at the New York State of Health website “right here”, meaning at a LinkNYC kiosk.

That is not true.

Forget about the logistics of navigating the famously recalcitrant New York State of Health website through a small tablet screen without a physical keyboard on a city sidewalk in the cold of January. Even if using the New York State of Health website was practical it would be impossible to register anew entirely from a LinkNYC kiosk. Registration requires one to create an account and validate it using an e-mail address. Assuming a LinkNYC user even has an e-mail account it would be impossible for them to access it from the kiosk. Did product planners at CityBridge imagine users would create their New York State of Health account at one device and resume their registration at a LinkNYC kiosk? Why would anyone would do that? It could be possible to use kiosks for this if you already have an account from previous years at the New York State of Health. But the registration process also requires users to upload tax returns and documents for proof of income. Has quantum computing evolved to a point where this is possible from a LinkNYC kiosk? CityBridge product management in its condescending wealth would not know having never seen anything more than their link to the New York State of Health website.

YES, with a laptop or a tablet it should be possible to connect to the health exchange through LinkNYC’s Wi-Fi. But that is not the claim being made by CityBridge. Theirs is a cynical pronouncement few would question but which others hail as a signature achievement — a Smart City initiative making social services available to all. In fact it does no such thing. This digital divide remains unbridged. The only way to register for health insurance through a LinkNYC kiosk would be over the phone. That being the case you’d have better luck using one of the old payphones these kiosks replaced. Smart City indeed.
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One clue as to why CityBridge gets away with claiming it is possible to register for health insurance from their kiosks comes from a piece of typically soft media coverage, the likes of which LinkNYC seems amazingly capable of nurturing. The New York Times reported CityBridge “is working with GetCoveredNYC and the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications to create a health care enrollment app on tablets across the five boroughs.”

So, they are “working” on an app. Seriously? With zero revenue to be made from such an app, and with time running out before the registration deadline arrives, I do not think such a product will make it to LinkNYC kiosks any time soon.

Having fibbed about the ability to register from a kiosk at the present time I suspect that this app CityBridge refers to Does Not Exist™. It is vaporware.

The NYC.gov website, to its credit, does not mention LinkNYC as an option for registering at the New York State of Health, probably because the city knows it cannot be done.

But about a week after the previous reference the Times repeated the claim that registering for health insurance is possible through the kiosks, this time in a Q & A piece that almost looks like it could have been asked and answered by CityBridge itself.

This little bit of public relations gawkery, catering to the self-satisfied Smart City meme that LinkNYC kiosks are designed with community-first thinking, is emblematic of the flat out lies underlining the program. One early promise of LinkNYC was that the city would be blanketed with free Wi-Fi in every road and alleyway. To fulfill that promise, and to comply with zoning requirements, residential neighborhoods would be populated with advertising-free kiosks. That pledge might have been an intentional fabrication merely meant to grease the wheels of getting CityBridge’s monopoly franchise approved but those advertising-free units will almost certainly never appear.

So what about the free phone calls, weather snapshots, and transit updates? I found no issues with the transit data, which come from the MTA website. The HTML forms interface is clumsy to me and the typeface is tiny, but it works.

Weather snapshots are erratic, with reported current temperatures varying so widely from one kiosk to another that you might think climate change is a little too real. Three kiosks in a row last week showed temperatures at 40º, 60º, and 72º. On a very cold day in December I saw one kiosk report a balmy 49º. A couple of days ago, when it should have been too cold for me to care what LinkNYC thought the temperature was, this kiosk cheerily said I was out and about on a beautiful 82º afternoon.

I might have never noticed it before but recently other LinkNYC kiosks have borked one feature for which I had come to think they were actually reliable: The time of day. On December 24 at about 2:30pm this kiosk claimed it was 8:04am on January 2, 2009.

What of the free phone calls, a marquee feature which accounts for LinkNYC’s tagline as the “payphone of the future”?

Call quality from LinkNYC kiosks was always bad but it has actually gotten worse in recent months. This seems to be a deliberate choice of the kiosks’ maintainers. Most LinkNYC kiosks I encounter lately are set so the sound volume of the phone calls can only be turned up half way. It did not used to be like this. With any level of street noise (duh) this low-volume “feature” makes it almost impossible to hear whoever you have called (assuming the call you made even went through). This half-way volume limitation is supposed to be LinkNYC’s “after dark” mode, a concessionary setting begrudgingly made by CityBridge so that phone calls made at night would not disturb the sleep of people unfortunate enough to have a kiosk outside their bedroom window.

As of a couple of months ago I find that more and more kiosks are set to after dark mode all day long, not just at night, while others are set so that full volume on the loudspeakers can be reached 24/7. There does not seem to be a pattern or logic behind which ones are set to night mode and which ones are not.

Last year I discovered that successfully making phone calls from these kiosks was essentially a hit-or-miss affair, with calls connecting only about half the time. That ratio seems to have improved a bit, but that might be because network availability improved after CityBridge dropped its maximum call time on some kiosks from 4 hours to 55 minutes, and it only applies to kiosks where the tablet device works in the first place. Many of the tablet screens are dark, dangling like bats-by-their-balls in “Hang Tight” mode, or otherwise dysfunctional. One kiosk in my neighborhood looked like this for weeks, maybe even months. I know of other kiosk tablets that I don’t think ever worked.

I could go on with these observations but don’t worry, I won’t, though I have plenty more where this came from. These complaints might seem petty. I hear tech trolls, DoITT, and even CityBridge waking from its corporate slumber telling me to SHUT UP… But given the propaganda we’ve been fed about these things equalizing information and broadband access for all I do not understand how CityBridge, with its resources and municipal privilege, gets away with delivering such a half-assed product as LinkNYC.

What to make of the fibs? Should we believe anything CityBridge says about LinkNYC? The claim that you can register for health insurance from any LinkNYC kiosk: That’s not true. What of the early claim that purely residential areas would be given advertising-free kiosks? That appears to have never been true, though this apparent canard might reflect nothing more than bad or overly-ambitious planning. Claims that each LinkNYC kiosk is maintained twice weekly seem absurd given the state of disrepair in which so many of them languish. I suspect other fabrications inhabit the LinkNYC program but will let them pass for now. The bridge rots from the bottom. If CityBridge can get away with all these little lies they will move on to bigger ones — if they haven’t already.

I’ve never gotten past the tasteless way CityBridge addressed, or rather did not address their encampments that plagued the kiosks and turned some neighborhoods into toilets for the first 7 months of LinkNYC’s existence. Sycophantic press coverage suggested the company dealt with the matter swiftly but that is simply not true.

The poor and disenfranchised who gravitated to LinkNYC’s Internet web browser (formerly on the kiosks) were nothing but pawns in an arrogant, for-profit game of Smart City brinkmanship played by tech overlords who have done nothing to prove they have any business using a city’s streets and its people as their beta testing sandbox.

I used to watch some of the people sitting at the kiosks, grooving to YouTube music videos, watching full length movies while the so-called “rest of us” passed them by.

They were every bit a part of this town as the rest of us.

That was probably the first time a lot of those folks ever had regular access to the Internet, only to have the amenity sternly revoked with a condescending announcement that it was their fault for using the kiosks as their personal entertainment centers.

There could be blame to go all around but this was an inevitable result of bad planning and CityBridge’s prolonged indifference to their money-making consequences.

Sure, I could complain to 311, DoITT, or LinkNYC itself. But I’ve found 311 to almost always be a waste of time and those other routes are futile. I had made comments to LinkNYC on Twitter but I’ve either been ignored or asked to take it to Direct Messaging (no thanks). A Facebook posting I made regarding the kiosk’s poor phone call quality was deleted by whoever manages the LinkNYC page, an admittedly petty incident which nevertheless teed me off enough to decide I should not reach out to them anymore. There are other ways for me to waste my time.

I could align with some of the anti-tech and anti-surveillance activists. They want me to. I’ve considered it. I have met with them. But I don’t know what value one such as I could bring to something like that. I am not an activist-minded soul to begin with but even if I was I don’t think my voice and relatively respected reputation in the realm of public telephony would land on anything but deaf ears at DoITT or anywhere else of relevance.

This story will, I know, be read and summarily waved away and ignored by CityBridge and all involved. (I have access_logs!)

This Smart City stampede cannot be stopped, no matter its unproven track record or, in the case of LinkNYC, obvious dysfunction. I don’t know about other programs but the LinkNYC initiative in particular is simply not one of those things where the public’s input matters. Money is being made so SHUT UP.

My interest in these kiosks makes sense given their connection to the world of public pay telephones. But it as a niche interest. Many New Yorkers do not know or do not care that these things exist. I’m starting to think I shouldn’t care, either.