760-733-9969. Those 10 digits might signify nothing to the masses, but to the digerati, however, they tell one of the great stories of the Internet.
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In short, the Mojave Phone Booth is back.
The booth was originally installed in the 1960s, no one seems to know quite when, as a frontier phone line servicing volcanic cinder miners. It was at a dusty crossroads in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a day's drive away from the shining lights of Las Vegas. The site was and remains several miles from the nearest paved road.
In 1997, an unnamed man on a rambling road trip spotted the unlikely phone icon on a map and decided to visit it. He wrote an article describing the Zen detour for an underground paper, and Godfrey Daniels, an early Internet adopter, read it and was inspired. He created a tribute website, still extant, and it struck a chord among a generation hopeful about the connective power of technology and its positive impact on society. A legend was born.
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People started phoning in. An empty gesture, perhaps, this reaching out into the void of the vast Mojave Desert, knowing there would be no one there to answer your call. Then one day, someone answered.
After that, there was no stopping them. People would drive out for the experience of being there, for the serendipity of the conversations with callers from all over the world. A Los Angeles Times reporter drove out to cover the story and ended up fielding conversations with people he would never have been aware of otherwise. For such a lonely monument, it was an incredible social networking platform and connectivity conduit.
The Times article was the beginning of the end for the Mojave Phone Booth. It was less than a year later, in 2000, that Pacific Bell shut it down.
Now it's ringing once more—sort of.
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