Here’s my project proposal for Urban Computing:

One of the themes that I’ve been interested in is the shift from matter to bits disrupting the necessity of urban density. So I started thinking about what that density could provide that would, in turn, be valuable to the exchange of bits – some edge that the city had over suburban sprawl when it came to data. The answer, of course, is the pervasive access to the internet. Because there are so many wifi nodes in such a small space, it becomes possible to be connected almost everywhere.

Similarly, physical piracy of movies and music, which still outstrips digital piracy by a wide margin, takes advantage of the density and anonymity of cities to create an underground market. The digital underground is, of course, file sharing, and largely bit torrent at this point. But bit torrent also mirrors the primary disadvantage of the physical pirates – it’s only really easy to get popular things, while obscure media is only available through official channels. (I love the irony that the most pirated things are also the most purchased, and the ones the RIAA and MPAA are the most concerned about.)

I want to take advantage of the wifi abundance and the anonymity of the city to setup simple web servers to seed media torrents over open networks. The goal is to set up several nodes seeding the same content, to increase download speeds, and they will ideally be remotely accessible, so that the media could be easily changed (tho, at the moment, battery power will dictate how long they will be active). It will be an invisible sort of graffiti, using the data itself instead of an abstracted message.

They have to be disguised, of course, to prevent tampering. My idea was to hack a Linksys router and file storage into a pair of old shoes, and toss them over light poles near open wifi, appropriating a traditional feature of the city to help spread media that may not be gotten otherwise. I haven’t settled on content yet, but it will probably be things that are not otherwise available, but should be seen or heard – ideally on the topic of the freedom of information.

Well, that’s my idea. I’d love to hear your feedback, as it was only one of several directions I thought of going in. (I also considered having the web servers only serve their data locally, but I couldn’t come up with a good reason for it, or why anyone would connect to it in the first place. So there’s that, too.)