Philadelphians welcomed PhilTel’s first free public phone as a small way to resist big tech
A group of about 20 tech-savvy engineers and programmers gathered Saturday afternoon at a Philadelphia bookstore to celebrate the installation of an old-fashioned public pay phone.
Organizers of the project hope the phone, which is free to use for calls in North America, is the first of many in the city and will help spur a restoration of the public communications infrastructure that has been eroded by cell phones carried by most Americans.
But there’s more to PhilTel, the project launched this year by Mike Dank, a 31-year-old software engineer who lives in Springfield, Delaware County, and Naveen Albert, 21, a senior computer engineering major at the University of Pennsylvania.
» READ MORE: The return of pay phones in Philly? One hacker wants to make it happen.
To PhilTel supporters interviewed at the installation, the effort to restore public phones represents resistance to society’s thoughtless adoption of technology they believe could be turned on a dime into a tool of oppression, economic growth for growth’s sake despite the environmental impact, and the planned obsolescence that induces many consumers to buy new cell phones every few years.
“There’s a lot of stuff sold to us and pushed to us that we don’t need,” said Michael Somkuti, a computer network engineer who lives in Philadelphia.
Somkuti, 25, is a regular at Iffy Books, which is on the third floor of a mixed-use building at 319 N. 11th St. and where the phone was installed in a hallway right outside the store. Iffy Books opened in July 2021 and specializes in books and events on hacking, gardening, and generally “empowering people to be less reliant on big tech companies,” its website says.
Steve McLaughlin, the owner of Iffy Books, where he hosts workshops on things like bleeding control basics, programming, and circuit-building, described the new phone as “an experiment with a shared resource.”
The inspiration of PhilTel came from a project in Portland, Ore., where an engineer named Karl Anderson installed the first Futel phone in 2014, according to the Oregonian newspaper. Futel now has eight phones in that city, and one each in four other cities, including one as far away as Detroit, according to…
