Playa Phone

This phone is my project. I'm happy to answer questions.

Our first time out on the playa together, my girlfriend and I stopped by this phone booth and made a couple of calls. And because we stopped, we saw the FSM camp next door, and a giant sign saying "Weddings Here", so we inquired. They offered us free rings and then announced our wedding over a loudspeaker. In 2 minutes we had an entire wedding party, complete with best man, an elder to give away the bride, 25+ guests, and an officiant. My newly-minted best man even gave me one of my favorite playa gifts ever as a wedding gift. We opted not to "make it official", though they offered. It was a truly incredible experience. Thanks FSM!

This is a great project! I've been to Burning Man 10x and interactive projects are my favorite part.

Also, if I may, for folks that might appreciate more phone-based spontaneity, I've built an app to revive the social phone call. It works like a bat signal. Light your beacon and it reaches all your friends at once. The first friend to answer connects 1-1 and every other signal quietly drops. Check it out at trybeacon.chat

I called. Talked to a perfectly decent guy who was there for the first time. He was there with his wife, but didn’t bring his younger children. Pleasant conversation. And there was a line of people waiting.

Is Burning Man fun? I got the rather cynical impression that it's mostly very well off tech people and even better off finance/political people.

Not trying to be flippant, genuinely curious if my impression is based on reality or am I making things up.

I just had a great chat with Michael, who was having a hard time because his girlfriend didn’t come with him to Burning man. Great chat!

Burning man livestream here, still early and setting up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BgytKvsORM

Page says it's on "Chomolungma" but it's "Ceiba" on the maps, just in case you can spot the phone on the stream.

Brad Templeton did this 20 years ago, https://www.templetons.com/pq/build.html

There's a bunch of neat public payphone art projects out there. A friend of mine runs Futel, which has some fairly elaborate voice menus and several phones installed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futel

In Australia, Telstra is required to keep the payphone network up and running. You can make free outgoing calls to landlines and mobile phones. And I just read that you can call inbound as well (which I did not know). Now the fun begins.

Brings whole new meaning to "Burner Phone." Nice.

I always wanted to build a local mesh network of pay phones on the playa and call it Black Rock Telecom. Maybe 12 or more phones set on plazas. Geographically not being located in the US made this project tricky to realise.

0 outgoing, nobody knows numbers anymore and even if you could look it up you won't punch numbers like its 1992.

With that said, amazing project. super cool that people can call in

The real-time stats on the website are fascinating. Did you set those up to satisfy your own curiosity, or to give remote callers a sense of "presence" at the playa?

This is great. I have a COCOT myself with an ATA adapter. So so much fun, great job!

called and got through after three attempts, had a pleasant conversation and it uplifted my mood. thanks!

This is a beautiful example of hacking, making something useful!

Would be fun to read if the calls were recorded and transcribed.

I looked but I don't see how it works. How does it get power? I suppose it uses a some single board computer and VOIP.

No phonebooks there. Just a map. Oper-a-tor?

The live status dashboard at the bottom is a fantastic touch. Reminds me of the best kind of hacker projects that combine physical retro hardware with modern web telemetry.

Phun and wholesome project. What service do you use for VoIP?

Dammit I left my acoustic coupler at home.

I had an idea like this years ago, only my idea was to put two of these on the playa and have them only call each other. Do you could pick one up, the other would ring, and you could talk to a random person.

phone rings

    Stoned burner picks up, mumbles "Uhhh, hullo, who dis?" into the horn while eyeing two giant wasp-colored octopi overhead making love 

    "Hello sir and or madameperson. I won't take up much of your time. See, your number was posted to the pre-eminent forum for everything that goes fast and breaks things."

   "Uhhh, yeah whatever man"

   "I'll cut right to it, seeing that you're an important, busy man like myself. I will just take one short minute to talk to you about our lord and saviour, *VC Money*."

What do you even talk about on a phone call like this?

I have both intense social anxiety and FOMO. Knowing that this thing exists for a week and then no more is torture.

Would be fun to see how the calls went lol

Fun! Just wished someone a happy burn.

An old injury, but I'm always devastated to see BRC stuff on HN. It's like watching Elon snap a Nazi salute at inauguration: an unwelcome but undeniable admission that something (or someone) admirable can shift smoothly to moral horror without losing (or perhaps even burnishing) its reputation.

BRC was an artistic rebellion, and now it's where people like me go to network.

I can't take me anywhere.

[dead]

I bet the dataset of who is calling who is pretty valuable. It's people related to others who were willing to drop a bunch of money to go to the desert, so you know they likely have some disposable income. If this operator isn't collecting this, it may be a good business opportunity for a competitor.

Did the original founders intend burning Man to be a parody on the trash heap that is 21st century human civilization?

So happy to see that the comments so far are just Burning Man hate. I appreciate SomaFM's impact on my appreciation for electronic music and alternative music streaming services back in the '90s, but outside of that I'm pretty sure it's mostly been a net negative from a cultural standpoint in total.