Hasta La Ideas

Homeless Hotspots features profiles of some of the people carrying wi-fi signals, along with a suggested fee to be paid for the service. Screenshot from http://homelesshotspots.org

We love to be connected. Thanks to wireless 3G networks, it’s easier than ever to check email and Twitter, talk on the phone, pay your bills, watch videos and post pictures from virtually anywhere and at any time. But it’s not fast enough—wireless internet is still the fastest way to get online with a mobile smartphone or tablet.

Recently at SxSW, a project called Homeless Hotspots sparked a heated debate online. A great post at NPR linked to the flurry of media about the project, such as quotable quotes like Wired declaring it “like something out of a satirical science-fiction dystopia.”

The project had more prosaic goals, which was to update the analog practice of street newspapers as a source of revenue for those without homes:

Our hope is to create a modern version of this successful model, offering homeless individuals an opportunity to sell a digital service instead of a material commodity. SxSW Interactive attendees can pay what they like to access 4G networks carried by our homeless collaborators. This service is intended to deliver on the demand for better transit connectivity during the conference.

BBH Labs defended their project in a length blog post, emphasizing that the participants were compensated for their work. It’s a thoughtful post worth reading.

I started thinking about Liam Young’s Electronic Countermeasures project, which has been making the rounds on social media. Young’s project reflected on the need for constant connection through a more robotic means. The video feels like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But this time, our alien friends aren’t delivering news from outer space: they’re bringing us the Internet.

In his video description, Young expands on the sci-fi nature of his work, which reimagines quadcopters as a pirate network of wi-fi routers that quickly disperse and reconfigure throughout cities:

We have built a flock of GPS enabled quadcopter drones from components that were originally intended for aerial reconnaissance and police surveillance to create this flying pirate file sharing network. The drones are autonomous and drift above the public spaces of the city as a balletic interactive aerial choreography. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local wi-fi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere.

It’s a stunning image, these magic Golden Snitches that we desperately try to catch with our phones.

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