Q: What is plugfinder?

A: plugfinder is a website that helps people find electricity outlets in the city, and encourages them to do things there.

Q: What kind of ‘things’ would you ‘do’ at an electricity outlet in a city?

A: Charge your cell phone, cook food on a hotplate, project slides onto a building, or maybe install an inflatable sculpture. There is a list of interesting ideas/projects here. You know how Downtown Development Authorities will often plug in Xmas lights during the holidays to spruce up the main commercial streets? Like that, but everybody gets a chance to decorate the street.

Q: Why map out electricity outlets?

A: Lots of reasons:

1. Gives people an excuse to walk outside AND visit parts of the city they have never gone to before. We just covered essential public health and economic initiatives in one swoop. Bam!
2. InfoNomads always need a quick burst of electricity to charge up there gear. Your city WANTS to attract the creative class, right? If your city is smart, you'll get corporations to freely give out electricity on the street as part of Payment in Lieu Taxes (PILOT) plans.
3. Making electricity outlets public has all kinds of positive unintended consequences: think about the reduced property damage when kids can project their graffiti rather than put it on the wall with all those awful chemicals.
4. It'll make your city more interactive. Thats cool right? Like Archigram envisioned, but more diffuse and street level.
5. Democracy requires communication. Communication increasingly happens with ICT. ICT requires electricity. Democracy requires electricity?
6. Don't take my word for it. You'll probably only listen when the venture capital starts to roll in, anyways. This is America after all.

Q: Won’t this project just encourage people to use more electricity and contribute to global warming?


A: Perhaps but seems unlikely. In the short term the additional use of electricity by participants of this site may indirectly add some immeasurably small amounts of additional CO2 into the atmosphere, it may be worth it if helps people think about where their electricity comes from, or even, if it decreases the use of spray cans for graffiti by substituting in temporary e-graffiti or image-bombing campaigns. Moreover, ubiquitous hubs for electricity and wireless hotspots promotes a dense information city which priveleges accessibility over mobility.

Also, as energy use becomes increasingly regulated and we all become spime wranglers plugging into outlets on the street will be no different than plugging into our outlets at home. Currency will be deducted from our natural capital account in real time. That sounds a little scary, but so does total global collapse, so we'll see what shakes out.

Q: Aren't you encouraging stealing?


A: No. On the contrary we are creating a niche market which some enterprising business person needs to capitalize on.

For example:

It is clear that the easy access to free or cheap electricity creates enormous social and cultural capital-- one need only look at the rise of coffee shops, which are as much refuel stations for laptop computers as for humans.

Smart, progressive municipalities might find providing free electricity in parallel to providing free internet access, all over the city would be a boon for the local economy.

Also, if you are one of those horrible bean counters who only understands arguments in terms of dollars per square inch, think about the net increase of cultural tourism dollars because of Bansky's graffiti:

If you can find a way to monitize these hubs of cultural capital creation you will be in business. As citizen-hacker of the 21st century replaces the citizen-consumer of the 20th century, capital better find out how to internalize the positive externalities of cultural production, and the negative externalities of pollution.

Good luck.