Freego

Walking the Freedom Trail

The Boston Freedom Trail is a major tourist at­trac­tion for ex­ploring many of the im­por­tant mon­u­ments and sites of our na­tion's early his­tory. My col­lab­o­ra­tors (Alicia Va­lencia , Hüma Şahin , Mal­lory Nezam ) and I were tasked to ad­dress this his­tor­ical pil­grimage— to ob­serve and re­flect on these sites in their past and pre­sent con­texts.

First, we pur­chased tickets and set off on the Trail. One of our im­me­diate ob­ser­va­tions was a feeling of in­sin­cerity— the tour felt hokey. It also led us to ques­tion the role and meaning of Freedom in the con­text of the Trail, as well as in America.

Tour guides, often in cos­tume— posing as "ghosts" of 18th-cen­tury po­lit­ical fig­ures, lead you through the Boston Common, Fa­neuil Hall, the house of Paul Re­vere, the Old North Church... all the way to Bunker Hill (where the trail ends).

First Im­pres­sions...

This was the birth­place of Amer­ican pa­tri­o­tism! These bat­tle­fields and memo­rials— the graves of our coun­try's fore­fa­thers— rep­re­sent our freedom and pros­perity!

The con­cept of freedom while walking the Trail felt lost, per­haps swal­lowed by a modern Boston. As tourists, the sites did not evoke a pro­found sense of re­spect or solem­nity, and the sug­ges­tion of pa­tri­o­tism felt no­tice­ably con­trived.

Most of our fellow tourists were more in­ter­ested in their phones, or taking away a nice selfie. At one point, the tour guide him­self pointed to a bar across from the grave­yard that holds Samuel Adams' re­mains:

The only place you can drink a cold Sam Adams while staring at a cold Sam Adams.

Coming from the class­room, we had ex­pected the Trail to offer more tools for in­tro­spec­tion— in­stilling a sense of grat­i­tude for the sac­ri­fices made in the name of freedom.

In our own in­ter­ven­tion, we would stir up some con­tro­versy. By forcing tourists to re­lin­quish some of their freedom, per­haps we could stim­u­late a more crit­ical look at what they have to lose.

Starting Up Freego

After some con­sid­er­a­tion, we de­cided to ap­proach our pro­ject by pairing our ini­tial re­ac­tions with the issue of freedom and pri­vacy in tech.

We sur­render our data to in­dustry gi­ants like Face­book, Mi­crosoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon everyday. Without so much as a thought, we trust these com­pa­nies to keep our data safe, giving them in­cred­ible powers of sur­veil­lance and con­trol.

In re­turn for the use of their ser­vices and prod­ucts, these com­pa­nies col­lect hun­dreds— some­times thou­sands — of data points on every cus­tomer. This data turns into likes and clicks which trans­late to sales and even votes .

We would pitch our in­stal­la­tion like a hot, new startup. We called our faux com­pany "Freego"— a cheap com­bi­na­tion of "freedom" and "go". Our product was wire­less freedom. We would in­stall mono­lithic WiFi an­tennas sit­u­ated at in­ter­vals along the length of the Freedom Trail, pro­viding free In­ternet con­nec­tivity to tourists.

Building a Mon­u­ment

Our pro­to­type an­tenna, a foam "obelisk" painted to look like stone, was out­fitted with a Rasp­berry Pi and a thermal printer (pow­ered through USB by a mo­bile bat­tery pack).

To con­nect to the Freego net­work, the tourist had to first com­plete a short, but de­tailed, ques­tion­naire. The net­work would act as a hon­eypot— col­lecting users' in­for­ma­tion: car­rier, de­vice type, lo­ca­tion, etc.— upon log­ging-on to the SSID.

The Freego App

Our killer "app"— the ques­tion­naire— was struc­tured sim­i­larly to an of­fi­cial Myers-Briggs Type In­di­cator (MBTI). After an­swering the ques­tions, the tourist would submit their re­sponses at which time the thermal printer would eject a small slip from the obelisk.

Sim­ilar to MBTI, our ques­tion­naire weighed per­son­ality traits in sev­eral dif­ferent cat­e­gories in order to as­sign a "sigil". How­ever, in­stead of cat­e­gories like sensing/​feeling or ex­tra­ver­sion/​in­tro­ver­sion (used in MBTI), our test judged more po­lit­ical pre­con­cep­tions— such as con­ser­vatism vs. lib­er­alism, or na­tion­alism vs. in­ter­na­tion­alism.

Taken to­gether, the tourist was as­signed a Freego "pre­scrip­tion" that dic­tates their po­lit­ical per­son­ality, as well as which unique path through the Freedom Trail they should take.

There were eight pos­sible out­comes based on the an­swers given in the ques­tion­naire:

• Bleeding Heart
• Cal­cu­lated Be­liever
• De­vout Amer­ican
• In­de­pen­dent Prag­ma­tist
• Pas­sionate Skeptic
• Prag­matic Pa­triot
• Re­flec­tive Cynic
• The One That Got Away

Each po­lit­ical per­son­ality has a unique em­blem, a de­scrip­tion of their as­signed iden­tity type, a de­c­la­ra­tion of the sites on the Trail that they should see (pos­sibly with some sites omitted en­tirely), and a set of in­struc­tions on how they should ap­proach the tour.

Con­clu­sion

Alas, we never had the chance to do a field study with this pro­ject. As a tem­plate for how we might begin to think about tech­nology and freedom, how­ever, I think it was a suc­cessful pro­ject. Thanks for taking the time to read, and please share some com­ments below.