📏Tall Dead Trees
From Kernel 5: Telephone poles as guerrilla public infrastructure
Kernel Magazine Issue 5 is now out! If you missed it, you can read Kevin Baker’s Editor’s Note here. We’re releasing a few pieces this week as previews — for the rest, join us at the launch in SF or order your copy of the magazine now!
—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann
Our first preview from Kernel 5 — written by Humphrey Obuobi and edited by Morry Kolman — is about making creative use of public infrastructure for communal technology, working inside and outside the rules and logic of the urban built environment. It’s a perfect match: as a writer, technologist, organizer, and founder of LETS Studio in Oakland, Humphrey is actively working with communities to figure out unexpected ways to use otherwise overlooked urban space; on Morry’s part, the Webby-Award-winning, New-York-Department-of-Transportation-cease-and-desist receiving Traffic Cam Photobooth is the exact kind of playful communal use of infrastructure that Humphrey’s essay is all about.
Humphrey will also be reading this piece and showcasing some of his work in telephone pole community tech at the Kernel SF launch this Thursday:
📏Tall Dead Trees
By
Telephone poles were the unsung heroes of the Information Age before the term was even applicable. The first telegraph poles were erected in the mid-1800s by Samuel Morse, recruited by the United States government to make instantaneous long-distance communication between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. a reality. Since then, the same infrastructure has been expanded and retrofitted to carry just about everything that is essential for our modern, interconnected lives: electrical power, broadband, or whatever else. These utilities increasingly are moving underground where possible, but the poles remain some of the most important public infrastructure we have for communicating with one another.
But more than anything, they are huge dead trees that are great for attaching other things to them, a fact we experience through little slips of paper at their bases. This is where local bands post about upcoming shows, and where the local tree-trimmer advertises their services. It’s how you find out that your neighbor has lost their dog (and sometimes, to your delight, an update that they’ve been found.) This is where stickers from your local anarchists and bored teenagers tickle your moral consciousness, give you a chuckle on your walk home from work, or simply blend into your periphery. Tacking things to the abundance of tall dead trees in your neighborhood is one of the most natural ways for us to “get the word out.”
It’s through this that the term “public communications infrastructure” takes on a double-meaning: not only are telephone poles good for connecting people across incredible distances, but they can also be used to help neighbors and passersby communicate with one another. While the scale of the second is smaller, we’re starting to remember how important it is for people who live next to each other to know each other well and share information with one another. In one of the greatest ironies of modern society, the same technologies that have connected us faster and more thoroughly than ever before have slowly killed off the newspapers, radio shows, and other media that once strengthened local ties — and have left little of note in their place. There are holes in the Web where “local media” should be thriving, and flyers on telephone poles are still some of the best tools we have.
This dual purpose hints at a conflict playing out on our poles each day, with those who wish to experiment with local media testing the limits of how “public” these things are. It’s an informative battle that reveals some humbling truths about how power flows in the city, as well as how it shapes the commons. And it’s a hopeful one — at least for those who are down to get their hands a little dirty.
Despite being public infrastructure, telephone poles are generally owned by private utility companies. The same public-private relationship that Morse pioneered still holds to this day throughout the United States: every place has a set of corporate owners (Pacific Gas & Electric in Northern California, Consolidated Edison in NYC) that operate according to regulations set by state and federal government authorities. Just about no one is saying that we should have community control over power poles, either, as there’s a lot of risk and technical expertise involved in coaxing lightning into a wire. But so far, the communitarian uses of the poles are rarely recognized by their formal owners. Neither government nor corporation seems interested in exploring how the poles could be used to support communication within the neighborhoods they are planted in.
Instead, we have all sorts of regulations that discourage any attachments to the pole. Even posting paper flyers isn’t technically legal in many places; most city governments have ordinances that outright prohibit posting signs on utility poles and lampposts, citing “aesthetics” and “obstruction” as their primary reasons. In the Bay Area, Berkeley and San Francisco’s laws explicitly recognize the importance of the poles as a forum for communication, but place significant restrictions on the form, content, and longevity of any posted signs. Utility companies, on the other hand, generally consider foreign fixtures on the poles a threat to utility workers and the consistency of their service. To their credit, PG&E does have a legal process for attaching devices to their poles through “pole licensing agreements,” but it’s mostly designed for other corporate telecom providers rather than community-run projects. While none of this seems to deter your average sign-poster, it definitely has a chilling effect on more ambitious and experimental projects.
When they do show an interest in street life, it’s usually for surveillance. The fact that telephone poles (along with street lamps, traffic light poles, and other infrastructure) are so commonly found on the street makes them a great place to place eyes and ears. Enterprising police departments have become fond of using these to document the street, though not with the intention of sharing everything they see with people on the ground. In response, corporations like Flock Safety have emerged to place automated license plate readers and other cameras in neighborhoods throughout the country, making the questionable claim that they can “eliminate crime.”
This then sparks the first major conflict on the poles: community protest against surveillance technologies deployed for state and capital interest. Progressive activists across the country have often protested against ShotSpotter (a gunshot detection device widely deployed throughout the country), saying that the devices draw unnecessary police presence into already over-surveilled and underserved neighborhoods. Through their organizing efforts, city administrations in Chicago, Durham, and other places eventually eventually retracted their ShotSpotter contracts. Other communities have chosen more “direct” forms of protest against their cities’ surveillance infrastructure; at various times in the last decade or two, rebels led by the mysterious “Captain Gasto” have literally shot down speed cameras that they see as an unfair assault on their “rights as motorists.”
City dwellers tend to know that surveillance cameras are far from the most interesting thing you can put on a telephone pole, and naturally explore more creative uses. Artists are always finding new things to put on poles, whether through knitting yarn sleeves around them (“yarn bombing”) or attaching sculptures to their surfaces. Every now and then, someone gets the idea to nail up a box labeled “FREE STUFF” and creates a more permanent way for people to share secondhand goods with each other in the process. Even digital technologists have gotten in on the fun; Riley Walz recently installed “BopSpotter,” an internet-connected phone that identifies the music it hears from its perch on a lively (undisclosed) street corner in the Mission. These emergent practices amount to much more than just the “signs and advertisements” that municipal lawmakers imagined; here, we find communities using the pole to share resources, information, and reflections of culture.
Mesh networks – self-installed and interconnected routers installed throughout a given area – show us how far we can push the idea of “public communications infrastructure.” They’ve often been initiated by a few technology-savvy folks (like gamers, radio enthusiasts, or bored software engineers) and over time, a healthy global community of people who care about providing low-cost, resilient internet connections to their neighborhoods has emerged. Guifi.net started with a single person installing nodes on existing telephone poles and church steeples, and it gradually grew to include tens of thousands of nodes covering much of Catalonia. These projects are not strangers to their own subversive nature, either; they often call out the gaps that telecom companies have left behind, and position their work as an alternative grounded in common ownership. Some networks even operate as a place-based “intranet,” supporting an exchange of local information, art, and chat rooms specific to that place.
The unfortunate reality is that these community-based experiments with telephone poles are the exception rather than the rule. Whether or not you believe these little attachments are actually a danger or an aesthetic abomination, the threat of enforcement gives folks plenty of pause about placing their own art or devices on what is ironically considered private property. Googling “mesh network nodes on telephone poles” gives you a sense of the discourse within the DIY communities that maintain them; anytime someone suggests attaching a radio node to a telephone pole, a more experienced operator usually chimes in to note the risk of fines and imprisonment. Practically speaking, many nodes also need to be placed high enough to avoid obstructions, and getting high enough on a utility pole isn’t always easy – nevermind the permits and associated fees. As such, node operators still prefer to use the rooftops of their own buildings for their devices, avoiding confrontation with the government or utility companies.
There’s a layman’s truth hidden in all of this: people should be able to put things on telephone poles to communicate with the people around them. An anonymous poster on the niche Q&A website Fluther put it well:
“Well if it is illegal to hang a sign on a dead tree in public places, then we truly have a dictatorship and certainly not a democracy. Ridiculous. There are fewer and fewer options for anyone to legally reach the community without paying large corporate owned media, or having some uptight citizen cry spam. Hanging a sign on a pole is not as unsafe as taking away a man’s right to communicate with his community.” (source, lightly edited)
In the meantime, there’s an established practice of “tactical urbanism,” a term to describe grassroots attempts to modify streets and sidewalks without asking for permission from the powers that be. It goes beyond just chalking up a sidewalk or posting a flyer; in general, guerilla urbanism projects are serious attempts to change the flow of people, traffic, and resources for the collective’s benefit. They typically respond to a clear need in a community, such as a missing crosswalk at a busy intersection or an unprotected bike lane. These efforts reflect the belief that people living in community with one another should feel empowered to create their own solutions to the challenges they collectively face (a “right to the city,” as sociologist Henri Lefebvre would say.)
Given how essential local connection and communication is, I see mesh networks, BopSpotter, and other “pole media” as important threads within this tradition. These projects redirect the power of the internet and other network technologies back towards local communities – a practice that thrived in earlier days of the internet, but has long been left by the wayside and neglected by dominant social media companies. To the people that run them, the pole (and other public infrastructure, for that matter) is a canvas that can and should be reclaimed for these communitarian purposes, regardless of what the telecom companies and city departments say. Regardless of their exact medium, it is refreshing and inspiring to see these people push the boundaries of hyperlocal media.
So yes, the utility company will probably get annoyed that you’re messing with their domain, or they might have some safety concerns about what you’re doing. The Public Works department will probably remove whatever you put up in due time, and they might even fine you. But when a project meets a genuine need in the community, these small acts of defiance are eventually embraced by those who recognize the creativity and the capacity to get things done. When it comes down to it, the possibilities of the pole are ours to realize.
is a technologist and organizer based in Oakland, CA. Much of their time is spent upgrading the tools that support a more functional and participatory democracy (primarily through their creative consultancy, LETS). They love ramen, street photography, and losing track of time.
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