BumpNet social experimentation through frustration
By Donald Melanson 
posted June 18th 2005 4:04AM
posted June 18th 2005 4:04AM
Jonah Brucker-Cohen is hoping that his latest project, BumpNet, will determine if people's behaviours can change by
simply attaching rules to communications infrastructures, and he's doing it in a way that's sure to test the patience
of its participants. BumpNet itself is a public wireless network, but one with a maximum limit on the number of
connected clients — whenever someone new connects to it, BumpNet will bump the first person in the queue off the
network. Jonah says the aim of the project is to "accentuate the subtleties of public interaction with an increasingly
technological social atmosphere". We just wouldn't want to be the one fielding all the complaints from the disgruntled
test subjects.
[Via we make money not art]
So who did i just bump off??
(added an extra wireless to my laptop
just to kick an other one!)
*looking for that cheap'o usb adapter i had lying around :o)
at least with 3 connections i should get warning enough to reconnect the first one again??
lets see. bash shell script!
thaz my logic anyway
/Kyndal
Kyndal, I didn't understand a word of that!
Jonah says the aim of the project is to “accentuate the subtleties of public interaction with an increasingly technological social atmosphere”.
Aka..."see how people react when they get pissed off bad enough"
That is a ghetto ass photoshop job of a Linksys wireless router.
tru story
oh wow... that's just cruel!
Will it surprise anyone when a little more investigation uncovers a huge government grant for this nonsense?
I'm voting for bad photoshop. He didn't even color the front-right foot.
If this is real, then it won't be long before someone is killed for knocking them off the internet. You thought road rage was bad? Just wait for this.
the story is real, the picture is whipped on photoshop, its completely obvious that its a linksys router, the front light panal and litle symbol on the bottom left give it a way, not to mention theres no real light effects
How about just going outside (*brrr*, I know, scary word for some) to meet people?
Bump-net is a take off on those of us "enjoying" free cross country cell phone calls to members of our "family"?
Makes sense actually. The first person is presumably the person who had used the network the longest. It would require a large number of seats for this to work. And relatively slow turnover. It should also be marketed as for surfing pages and not doing heavy downloads.
so we get to feel what it was like to have dial up again. This idea sucks, and I am already pissed that someone would even think of doing this. someone should bump his lame ass off.
Just a matter of time before everyone has an auto-reconnect script, and a neverending cycle of reconnects ensues as the first becomes the last and bumps off the former second.
Better would be to bump off the client with the longest idle time, but then you're left with everybody having keepalive scripts and bumping off a random person.