In the fall of 2009, Alexandra Janelli, an environmental consultant, was sitting in a bar on the Lower East Side, fiddling with her iPhone. A window popped up asking if she’d like to join a wireless network called Alcoholics Shut In. “I was, like, well, that’s really odd,” Janelli recalled recently. “I’m not a huge techie, but I thought to myself, There must be other funny names out there.”
Janelli started taking long walks around Manhattan with her dog, Finnley, a miniature Australian shepherd. (Her thirty-pound cat, after whom her own network, Don Gato, was named, stayed home.) In every neighborhood, she collected wireless names—a city dweller’s version of catching butterflies. The specimens were strange and wonderful. Janelli started a Web site, wtfwifi.com. “The more I started looking at it, the more I realized that it was really just a new form of media that people were using to express themselves,” she said. You used to send a pigeon, or post a note in the vestibule of your apartment building. Now you come up with an S.S.I.D.
Janelli calls herself a “WiFi detective,” stalking the fragmentary consciousness of the city. “People are taking it to the next level in terms of being able to be really cryptic and send a message,” she said. Her site is a treasury of passive-aggressive messages to neighbors (Stop Cooking Indian!!!), self-promotion (FutureLawyersofCharlieSheen), flirtation (*~*~cOuGaRviLLe~*~*), and frustration (We can hear you having sex). Some of the names are poetry (Dumpling Manor, More Cowbell). Some of them are mere description (taco breath 2). Janelli says that wireless names can act as welcome mats, luring their beholder into a store or a discussion, or as gargoyles, patrolling a patch of virtual turf. A certain genre of befuddling names are meant to send a wireless poacher scrambling to Google, and then to Urban Dictionary, to learn something he wishes he hadn’t. “You also find really creepy ones, like I Eat Babies,” Janelli said. “There’s weird stuff. I could see an amazing ‘Law & Order’ episode coming from this.”
Like other forms of self-expression, wireless names are subject to trends. For a few months last year, Janelli kept seeing Pretty Fly for a WiFi; then it was FBI Surveillance Van. Like architecture and restaurants, wireless names suggest the character of a neighborhood. “You cruise through all the streets, and there are certainly some areas that are much more affluent, I guess, in WiFi names,” Janelli said. “The Lower East Side has funny ones”—for example, DieTrustFundersDie—“as opposed to uptown, where it will be much more like Robinson Family. You also get, like, Empty Sighs and Wine,” evoking “the really lonely person on the Upper West Side.” Janelli’s favorite name is one that she found in 2009, in the financial district: fat man on 7fl is douche. “There aren’t that many residential buildings around,” she said. “You could probably narrow down who it is.”
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Sila Tiptanatoranin / Alamy
Janelli started taking long walks around Manhattan with her dog, Finnley, a miniature Australian shepherd. (Her thirty-pound cat, after whom her own network, Don Gato, was named, stayed home.) In every neighborhood, she collected wireless names—a city dweller’s version of catching butterflies. The specimens were strange and wonderful. Janelli started a Web site, wtfwifi.com. “The more I started looking at it, the more I realized that it was really just a new form of media that people were using to express themselves,” she said. You used to send a pigeon, or post a note in the vestibule of your apartment building. Now you come up with an S.S.I.D.
Janelli calls herself a “WiFi detective,” stalking the fragmentary consciousness of the city. “People are taking it to the next level in terms of being able to be really cryptic and send a message,” she said. Her site is a treasury of passive-aggressive messages to neighbors (Stop Cooking Indian!!!), self-promotion (FutureLawyersofCharlieSheen), flirtation (*~*~cOuGaRviLLe~*~*), and frustration (We can hear you having sex). Some of the names are poetry (Dumpling Manor, More Cowbell). Some of them are mere description (taco breath 2). Janelli says that wireless names can act as welcome mats, luring their beholder into a store or a discussion, or as gargoyles, patrolling a patch of virtual turf. A certain genre of befuddling names are meant to send a wireless poacher scrambling to Google, and then to Urban Dictionary, to learn something he wishes he hadn’t. “You also find really creepy ones, like I Eat Babies,” Janelli said. “There’s weird stuff. I could see an amazing ‘Law & Order’ episode coming from this.”Like other forms of self-expression, wireless names are subject to trends. For a few months last year, Janelli kept seeing Pretty Fly for a WiFi; then it was FBI Surveillance Van. Like architecture and restaurants, wireless names suggest the character of a neighborhood. “You cruise through all the streets, and there are certainly some areas that are much more affluent, I guess, in WiFi names,” Janelli said. “The Lower East Side has funny ones”—for example, DieTrustFundersDie—“as opposed to uptown, where it will be much more like Robinson Family. You also get, like, Empty Sighs and Wine,” evoking “the really lonely person on the Upper West Side.” Janelli’s favorite name is one that she found in 2009, in the financial district: fat man on 7fl is douche. “There aren’t that many residential buildings around,” she said. “You could probably narrow down who it is.”
by Lauren Collins, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Sila Tiptanatoranin / Alamy
