As Mayor de Blasio enters his 34th month at City Hall, New York remains a tale of two cities. The denizens of the “1 percent,” cocooned in their shadow-casting luxury condos, are free to watch SpongeBob and online porn all day on their $134.99-a-month Internet.
“ In a world where everyone has a smartphone, the people who actually need to use a free Internet tablet at a kiosk are vagrants.”
Ah, but the city’s most vulnerable citizens must suffer. In de Blasio’s New York, the poorest residents can’t achieve the American dream of gorging on “Family Guy” — or the not-so-private parts of exactly-of-legal-age naked ladies and their suitors — for hours on end.
This spring, the city and a group of tech firms announced something cool: free Wi-Fi. The LinkNYC partnership would replace 7,500 of the city’s payphones with Internet kiosks.
You could charge your phone at the kiosks, or use their free Wi-Fi on your phone. And if you don’t have a phone, you could use a built-in tablet at each kiosk to browse the Internet or make calls.
After a summer of the kiosks on a few avenues, what have we learned? In a world where everyone has a smartphone, the people who actually need to use a free Internet tablet at a kiosk are vagrants.
In retrospect, this makes sense. People often use the Internet when they’re bored. And it’s boring to be a homeless older man, one suffering from mental illness or addiction.
It’s boring to be a man who has no place to shower or wash his clothes, a person whom everyone else — people with the Internet in their pocket — avoids because of the smell and the ravings.
What did the vagrants use the new free Internet for? Not for short, productive bursts, to look up when Queen Elizabeth II started her reign or how to knit a hat, and then go read a book.
Also, like the rest of us, they had no reason to talk on the actual phone. They used the Internet, like everyone else, to watch TV or listen to music. And, like many people who aren’t vagrants, they spent hours staring at small screens like zombies.
Most of what I saw, walking up and down Eighth Avenue at least twice a day, was PG-rated, although other New Yorkers saw people masturbating to porn.
The nice liberal people of New York didn’t like this. The same people who find broken-windows policing distasteful and racist called the police, who duly arrested one masturbator. (In six months, look for a liberal piece about how he’s unfairly caught up in the criminal-justice system for a crime that didn’t harm anyone.)
But most of the homeless weren’t doing anything illegal. They were doing what everyone was supposed to be doing: using the free Internet.
So New Yorkers couldn’t do much about it , except wonder why they didn’t like a smelly old crazy man watching “The Simpsons” when a little immigrant girl doing research for school would’ve been cute.
Except New Yorkers could do something about it! The city and the tech gods gave us the free internet, and what they gaveth, they could taketh away.
So they did last week — disabling browsers at the kiosks’ tablets.
The city says the shutdown is temporary while the tech people figure out something that no one has figured out: how to make people — or those people — use the internet only for good things, and only for short times.
By late last week, the city’s vagrants were back where they were supposed to be, sitting on cardboard boxes on the sidewalk, muttering to themselves.
No, we still haven’t figured out what to do with homeless older men — the substance-addicted and mentally ill people who haunt our streets, with no place to bathe or change their clothes.
They can go to shelters at night. But shelters are dangerous.
The city could have drop-in centers during the day for vagrants to shower and pick up donated clothes. But such centers, too, would be dangerous, and no businessperson or resident would want one nearby.
But we did fix one problem: The people whom nobody wants around can’t have free internet.
It’s just not . . . what the progressive city envisioned.
Free speech the way people actually use it — that is, to watch whatever they want, however long they want — is only for people who have the mental health to afford to put four walls around it.
This piece originally appeared in the New York Post
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in New York Post