"You already have impressive event experience going, but do you know if AIs are recommending it? I will set up llms.txt for free for you, no pressure, not trying to pitch anything. If not interested, just reply 'not interested'".

"Have you accepted the Living Musk into your life?"

"Hello sir/madam, I'm calling about the extended warranty for your car!" /s

A little of both. It was popular enough off of a Reddit post last year that people were hearing a lot of busy signals. I thought it might entertain some folks to see just how busy the phone has been in the last hour.

It has changed a bit in recent years, but there's still only very spotty cell service at Burning Man. Enough people can figure out how to look up a phone number that this phone still dials out thousands of times during the week.

The bigger problem for this project is because of phone spam, fewer people will answer calls from unknown numbers, so a lot of those calls go to voice mail.

Is it possible that people don’t realize you can make free calls? Perhaps they think you need coins, which they don’t have on them.

Similar to interactive installations in museums. People are afraid to touch things in museums. You really need a big sign to tell them it is the purpose to play with it.

Or leave them as private, ephemeral experiences for the two involved parties.

That seems like it would destroy the “vibe” of the entire concept. Would you use a pay phone if the recording and transcript was publicly available?

I ripped the coin-aware guts out of a pay phone I bought from Craigslist, and replaced them with a basic touch-tone board, then hooked that up to a voice-over-IP adapter so it can make calls over the Internet. All of that is powered via power-over-ethernet, including the light in the sign above the phone.

It used to get a little bit of Internet directly from Burning Man itself via a 20 foot tower pointed near center camp, but now it just uses Starlink, which is easier for my campmates to set up without me and much more reliable.

For power, it is now plugged into a solar generator that is occasionally recharged from a gas generator.

there are a lot of gas generators powering people's camps.