Hi. I’m your head “douchebag”. I congratulate you on an excellent, well-crafted rant. I also apologize for the excessive text delivery. Every time an unprovisioned phone moved from Commnet’s service back to ours, it got a text message. It was not our intention to “spam” you; when we designed the autoprovisioning process we were not expecting another GSM network to be present on the Playa. This result was unexpected and we were not aware of the scope of it until after the fact. We had also assumed that people who wanted to use their phone for communication would respond, which would stop the messages. And we assumed those who didn’t plan to use their phones for communication would turn them off, which turns out to have been a bad assumption in your case.

How many messages did you actually receive, BTW? We had a collection of provisioned and unprovisioned handsets for testing, and did not see this kind of problem in our own phones. For example, I only got 4 copies of the message all week. We had heard reports of up to 12, but no more than that. You got a hundred? Really? Had we known the problem was at such a level, we would have shut down the system. We will certainly operate differently in the future.

As for supporting only high-end models, the fact is that we do most of our testing with the cheapest used Nokias we can find. But that’s a different topic.

Again, I apologize for the problem, which is about all I can do at this point. That and point out that the “X” our the callsign means “experimental” for a reason.

– David

Except that this year, I used my phone’s alarm function to get up at the right time to go out and do the work I committed to doing. Fair enough, right? I could have bought a cheap $10 Ikea clock and planted it on the dash to wake up on time, or relied on my campmate to wake me by 8AM every day (he did, but I was awake every day save one).

Thing is, I liked the service. I liked the concept, the attitude, the DIY hackitude and the capability of getting a network up and running.

What I didn’t like was the spam.

Specifically, the spam text messages sent every ten minutes to my iPhone from the Papa Legba’s team starting Friday afternoon at 1PM and ending just after midnight, Saturday morning.

“Reply with your 10-digit phone number to use Papa Legba’s experimental PLAYA-ONLY network. The system is very busy; please be patient. (NO EMERGENCY CALLS.)”

For one thing, I didn’t mind the first one. It gave me all the info I needed to opt out (assuming that the cell didn’t keep going). I COULD have replied and said, “Knock it off, I’m not going for it” but I didn’t.

As a digression: three individuals took it upon themselves to traipse around the playa handing out flyers that were printed, front and back, with the ACLU response to police officers or other law enforcement “hassling you” (quote from the flyer). While I salute the initial endeavor, these guys handed me five hundred of the things and told me I needed to hand them out to everyone I met.

Uh, excuse me? No no, that’s not MY job, that’s YOUR job. I am not your distribution system; I’m here to work and play and connect and have fun; I’m not here to contribute to the matter-out-of-place these flyers engendered. Burning Man is a Leave No Trace event; potentially, this was a LOT of Trace.

I am a firm believer that the people who built the Papa Legba system at Burning Man knew what they were doing and went around the edge of the system in order to make sure they couldn’t be held liable for little issues like, say, one hundred identical messages:

“Reply with your 10-digit phone number to use Papa Legba’s experimental PLAYA-ONLY network. The system is very busy; please be patient. (NO EMERGENCY CALLS.)”

Sent to my phone. I also know that they only were able to support the higher-end modules (which calls into question the accessibility of the system in third-world countries if all those wonderful people can only get on the system with a 2008 or newer Blackberry, iPhone, etc).

The question is, then, why did the people putting this out choose, voluntarily or involuntarily, to use the same tactics that cold-call marketers have figured out can’t be satisfactorily blocked and occupy huge amounts of the text messaging space? While it’s true that the email marketing spam industry now is more or less responsible for 90% of the world’s email, it’s also the reason one of the first things hosting services throw out for their consumer base is Spam Block.

I believe on many levels that someone in the group or camp decided that they really needed to wreak havoc on their system and see exactly how many people they could reach. With greater numbers, they’d get greater success.

But a once-a-day text would have likely served that purpose far better than one hundred text messages sent to my phone over a twelve hour window.

As a result, I’m still pissed off at them and don’t care how much their “service” was awesome, how neat the engineering was, how radical their idea of providing out-there-service might have been, or the technological and survivalistic capacities of their home-brewed network might have been.

All of those factors utterly fail to mitigate the fact that these guys sent out a mass text message spam like a bunch of douchebags. They had technology they really HAD to share with people, but they also failed the first question of any technology advancement:

Do people actually WANT $200 autovibrating gum stimulation toothpick simulators with vacuum action, or would they rather just use a wooden splinter?