This dude made me nervous. A minute or so before starting this video I saw him screaming at passersby and throwing punches into the air. Obviously under the influence of something I first spotted him sitting in his easy chair, watching YouTube videos on the LinkNYC device in front of him. He was scooping soup from a bowl into his mouth. He got up from his chair and made his way around the immediate vicinity, screaming at people while barely able to remain standing. You see a little of these intentions here, though he does not go full bore as he did earlier. I might have recorded longer but my camera’s battery was running low and the skies were about to burst with a summer thunderstorm.
10,000 LinkNYC devices are expected to invade virtually every street in New York over the coming years. With only 300 devices in place so far the commonality of unsettling sightings like the one in this video make the LinkNYC rollout feel like a slow-moving plague. LinkNYC claims it is “working with the city” to alleviate the problems of loitering and homeless camps set up around Links. A working solution to these problems would involve real creative thinking. This does not seem to be a strong point of CityBridge, the consortium of advertising and tech companies responsible for LinkNYC.
If you happen to be among those residents whose living room window is slated to have one of these blinking eyesores installed within arm’s reach then you might be able to petition your community board against having it installed. But the city’s comments thus far seem to suggest that the LinkNYC rollout will continue unabated. There is just too much money to be made for community concerns to register.
At certain spots along the Avenues you might find yourself staring at a virtual cascade of Links, sometimes all of them displaying the same advertisement. Here is a blighted streak of three Links in a row on Third Avenue. There was actually a fourth Link directly next to me, and another one across the street.
The only requirements the city put on the placement of Links is that they must be at least 50 feet apart. I don’t carry a yardstick or measuring instrument but in some locations it looks like Links are being installed as close to that limit as possible. One has to ask how much advertising is really necessary, and what urban planner’s decision making process created this 50-foot rule. The Wi-Fi signal is supposed to be good for at least 150 feet, so why isn’t there a 150-foot rule?
One might also ask what public service could be offered by these devices beyond PSAs and Olympics schedules. The Shazam application, which claims to report on the songs nearby residents most frequently cannot identify, is a certifiably wanky attempt at relevance. A Streeteasy campaign which showed apartment listings in the neighborhood almost makes sense, although renting an apartment is not usually an impulse decision.
Useful information, such as the time of day, the temperature, sports scores, and a stock market snapshot might bring some value to this blight of screens. The Olympics schedules which now appear in the ceaseless rotation of advertisements represent an as-yet oddly singular attempt at providing useful content which does not appear to be monetized. This effort notwithstanding I think that resources going forward will not likely be given to content which does not monetize.
Something hyperlocal like bus arrival times could be aces. Or one could imagine the New York Times or similar entity sponsoring headlines and news blurbs. In an emergency situation (assuming there is no power outage) one might expect these Links to carry CNN or other televised news coverage with closed-captioning. An opt-in video game leaderboard would be fun. These are basic no-brainer ideas from someone who really does not even understand the devices’ full capabilities or how content is piped in to them.
There is no AdBlock for these things but I could imagine a line of ocular accessories which cause the 55″ advertising screens to be rendered blank. I had a similar idea years ago when a security guard at the Citi building in Long Island City informed me I was not allowed to take photos of the building. I was not actually even doing that but it annoyed me nonetheless to know that such a conspicuous and visible structure was expected to vanish down the memory hole as a result of unenforceable rules forbidding it from being photographed. At first I set about taking as many pictures as possible of the Citi building, from locations where no security guard could stop me. I gave up on that somewhat childish pursuit, instead nurturing the idea of CitiView. CitiView would be a line of glasses which, when worn, cause the Citi building in Long Island City to disappear. The glasses would contain filters which cause the teal colors of the Citi building to not be seen. This would prevent photographers from even thinking about taking pictures of that building, per that security guard’s orders.
LinksView would be a similar product, filtering away not just LinksNYC’s overbearing advertising platters but all blinking LED advertising screens seen at bus stops, subway stations, and just about everywhere else in town. The idea of AdBlock for the physical world almost sounds tenable.
No such fantasy AdBlock exists today, and it likely never will. As a society being forced into a “Smart City” soup of technological pollution (it’s BETA, so anything goes) we must simply accept that we are going to ingest more and more advertising, and we are going to like it.