Meditations on Societal Collapse (Via Payphone)
by Maya Ventura
Let's consider a hypothetical.
You are in the downtown area of your local city center. You have been dropped there with absolutely nothing but the clothes on your back - no purse, no pocketbook, no phone, no keys, no change, nothing. You are in trouble. You have to reach someone you trust. You know their phone number, all you need is a phone. Asking to borrow someone's phone is pretty unlikely to work - we live in a low-trust society these days, after all. What would be the cheapest way to buy a cell phone and get it connected to a provider?
The best place I can think of for this that is likely to exist in a downtown city location is Dollar General. The best deal you'll get on a phone is for a TracFone-branded smartphone for $19 - for the phone. TracFone's cheapest service plan is $15 a month. With modern prepaid brands offered by both AT&T and Verizon, you can't just connect them to Wi-Fi and go about your day - they require activation in order to get past setup. These are subsidized devices, it's never gonna be that easy.
So right there, you're at $34 total for a phone and service - and, of course, you can't buy a prepaid cell phone at most retailers without a valid ID, either. Looks like this entire thought exercise was pointless, eh?
Now, of course, what if I told you there was a way to make a phone call in a public place for usually just two quarters, or one dollar for long distance, or, hell, zero dollars and zero cents if you're really in a pinch and calling collect? More than that, what if I told you that these were adopted en masse, available pretty much everywhere from office buildings to train stations, and had very little downtime when paired with bare basic regular service and maintenance?
And then what if I told you we pretty much entirely got rid of this solution in favor of the previous one? You probably see where I'm going at this point. Folks: the public payphone.
Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking that the scenario I'm positing is pretty unlikely. And you'd be right! So, in order for me to make some kind of a case here, let me use a much simpler example - my old, cracked, worn-out iPhone.
I have absolutely beat the hell out of this phone. It sits at about 2.5 hours of battery life when actively in use. As a result, when I'm out doing full day trips when I'm without my car, it's often dead. It's meant I've not been able to reach people I'm picking up from various places, whether something for work, or girlfriends from the Greyhound station. Indeed, it seems reasonable to say that transit hubs are a particularly good case for having public phones on offer - and, actually, some of Pittsburgh's Light Rail stations still do have them or did have them until recently. You will often find very small banks of individual public phones at airports, almost always equipped with TTY keyboards. In my experience, that's actually true in a lot of places, including at rest stops along sections of Interstate 80 (among others) - major highways being a similarly good use case, particularly for emergencies.
I actually want to talk about emergencies specifically for a minute. Once upon a time, there used to be public phones on a lot of street corners, particularly in cities. These were genuinely great for emergency cases - for both bystanders and victims, whether that's something like a car crash, or just simply being robbed... a scenario where you're quite likely to not have a phone on you for rather obvious reasons. In the case of ones placed in rest stops along major highways, it's also a great resource if you simply need to call AAA. When it comes to much more wide-reaching disasters, they play a similar role, as public phones often continue to operate during blackouts (a fact Verizon used to brag about). Indeed, after September 11th, Verizon installed over 220 wireless payphones in addition to the 4,000 already installed in downtown Manhattan, and offered free calls to the public through them. Not to say that 9/11s are particularly common these days, but with general weather disasters and large-scale violent acts at all-time highs thanks to climate change and the dawn of new political extremism, I think it's a reasonable point, particularly considering headlines from late last year about Elon Musk's offer of "free" Starlink Internet access in areas affected by Hurricane Helene actually costing upwards of $400 for equipment. (Community Note: False. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said the company is waiving costs in affected areas.)
But there's actually one use case that I want to put a little more focus on, which I started really thinking about after exploring some of the resources available at my local library - people without housing.
This is where the prepaid cell phone pricing I mentioned earlier in my implausible hypothetical comes into a real-world scenario. There is a significant population out there that simply can't afford or access that for one reason or another - cost or lack of necessary documentation. Even as cell phones get more affordable over the years, there's still a pretty significant barrier for someone with no income, particularly considering being in poverty is also highly correlated with not having access to a current ID.
The Carnegie Library system here in Pittsburgh is actually very accommodating towards folks without access to an ID - offering membership to Allegheny County residents pretty much automatically as long as there is an electronic record of them residing there, and accepting pretty much anything with an address on it otherwise. They also offer career training opportunities, voter registration resources (a voter registration card actually being enough to get library membership, coincidentally) and computer access, on top of being a fee-free library system overall, making the whole library system an extremely good resource for underprivileged folks.
However, the CLP main branch in Oakland has one resource that surprised me: an actively maintained payphone. That phone is actually what got me thinking about their potential utility to underprivileged communities - after all, it's a lot easier to get two quarters than it is to pay for a whole phone - as well as the general population at large simply just for convenience and accessibility.
But despite everything, telecom giants - namely AT&T and Verizon - are pretty gosh darn uninterested in maintaining infrastructure like public phones, regardless of the societal benefits, because it absolutely is not worth the investment in terms of capital. Verizon and AT&T's decision to depart from the public phone industry and just abandon existing infrastructure, despite it having next to no direct impact on their bottom line, is depriving us of a valuable resource in service of an additional half of a decimal point on their annual reports.
And that's what all of this represents - a public service, unfairly painted as obsolete due to decrease in usage, totally decimated by major corporations, with every opportunity to save it, whether in recent history or 50 years ago, being missed. It sucks for everyone involved and we're worse off as a result.
To wrap this up, we're never going to see a resurgence of public telephones in this country. We've let go of something useful because corporations told us we didn't need it anymore. Denial of communication has long been a tactic used against undesirable populations, and the only people who are going to put up a fight against it are those of us in the hacker communities. We can't do much, but with luck, hopefully we will help to establish a new era of communication, one in which reaching out is not only desirable, but mandatory.