Party Line
Party Line #10 is available from Microcosm Publishing.
ArchiveCelebrate ten whole years of FUTEL’s guerrilla public telephone project with this latest issue of their long-running zine. This dispatch from everyone’s favorite anarchist art social service telecoms project features news from newly-up-and-running public phones in Portland, organic mutual support with the Multnomah County Library, beatboxing for a caller singing Taylor Swift, struggles with artistry and anonymity, and lots more. As of publication, the only public telephones, pay or otherwise, on the streets of Portland are now operated by FUTEL.
From the manifesto: “We are primarily driven by the basic needs that we see on the streets every day, by giving something away that is cheap for us but valuable to the recipient. But we hope that we can also build a tower of Babel on top of that, a monument of telephones and switching networks and cascading psychological structures which will give the community something else as well, something we may not appreciate until it has forever changed us.” Happy ten years of keeping public communication networks accessible and interesting, with over 15,000 calls made in 2024! FUTEL forever.