The trouble with superheroes
is what to do between phone booths.
Ken Kesey
Look at this magnificent anachronism, this relic standing there like some burned out roadie who missed the last bus out of town. A payphone in 2019 might as well be a fucking dinosaur bone embedded in concrete, except this thing’s still breathing, still offering that beautiful possibility of anonymous communion in an age when every goddamn sneeze gets catalogued and cross-referenced.
And those cameras. Jesus Christ, those cameras hovering overhead like mechanical vultures, cold eyes recording every pathetic soul who approaches this thing, probably feeding some algorithm that’s already decided what kind of person uses a payphone these days. Drug dealers, cheating spouses, people dodging warrants, or maybe just someone who remembers when connection didn’t mean surveillance, when reaching out didn’t require surrendering your soul to the digital panopticon.
There’s something beautifully contradictory about it, this monitored instrument of privacy. It’s like poetry written in rust and desperation. The establishment gives you this tool for secrecy while simultaneously documenting your every move toward it. They’re basically saying: “Yeah, make your call, whisper your sins, tell your secrets. We’re just gonna watch you do it.”
But that handset still works. You can still lift that receiver, drop your coins, and speak into the void the way humans used to: raw and unfiltered and real. It’s obsolete and surveilled and probably smells like piss and disappointment, but it’s still standing there, this stubborn middle finger to the age of transparency, offering one last gasp of something we used to call freedom, even if freedom now comes with cameras attached like remoras on a dying shark.