Party Line Magazine
    The Signal Lives in Darkness    

Futel is a project that repurposes old public telephones to once again provide phone access and services to everyone from random folks walking down the street to homeless camps.  Their zine records, in words and lots of photos involving power tools and jumbles of cords, their efforts, successes, pranks, roadblocks, and what it's like to be a Futel operator.

From their introduction: "We are primarily driven by the basic needs that we see on the streets every day, by giving something away that is cheap for us but valuable to the recipient.  But we hope that we can also build a tower of Babel on top of that, a monument of telephones and switching networks and cascading psychological structures which will give the community something else as well, something we may not appreciate until it has forever changed us."


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Party Line - Issue #1  Spring 2016




Party Line - Issue #2  Spring 2017

This issue of Party Line begins, "What will Futel's role be in the coming end times?  As an organization whose core strategy is to glean discarded equipment on its way to the smelter and toxic waste dump and turn it into installations which provide tools, information, and entropy to anyone who walks up to them, we are familiar with operating in the margins."  The zine chronicles the year 2016 for the rogue payphone network Futel.  Shows photos of their phone installations, includes touching and amusing excerpts from the operators' log, and an article about phone phreaking and the creator's history of hacking the phone system, which he compares with transit fare evasion as a political act.




Party Line - Issue #3  Spring 2018

Issue #3 of Party Line highlights new features like the Broadband Payphone Calling, a review of the year 2017 for Futel including a campaign to bring back public telephones, their much beloved operator logs, the history of hacking, photographs of their phone booth installations and more.




Party Line - Issue #4  Spring 2018

Futel lives on with its network of payphones, providing an important service and a way to connect with other humans free of charge.  This is the latest batch of stories from operators who worked the phone lines in 2018.




Party Line - Issue #5  Spring 2020

The team behind Futel, the Portland-based free payphone project, is back, using their technical expertise and radical imagination to connect the curious phone booth passersby with information, services, sass, and, if you select it, "a random concentration camp" on the U.S.-Mexico border.  The project was recently profiled in our local alt-weekly.  This issue celebrates FUtel's 5-year anniversary, reviews 2019's accomplishments (including installing Futel's first phone in Detroit!), logs calls, profiles other Futel-approved community projects, and eulogizes a Southeast Portland payphone that recently bit the dust in a dramatic way.




Party Line - Issue #6  Spring 2021

The team behind Futel, the Portland-based free payphone project, is back again, using their technical expertise and radical imagination to connect the curious phone booth passersby with information, services, and sass in the time of the global COVID-19 pandemic, offering up civic-minded programs such as telephone sanitation and hygiene, as well as notes on how to construct a community handwashing station.  Includes reviews of 2020 (it was a hell of a year!), calls log, conspiracies, and more.




Party Line - Issue #7

In this latest installation from the guerilla phone booth collective Futel, get the rundown on their latest operations, including data and anecdotes about the phones they have set up all over Portland from over the last year, a comprehensive list of the damages incurred on the existing phone lines, and where you can find the new phone they set up this year.  With entertaining tales of mysterious callers from all over the world, and an insiders look at what it takes to operate these free anarchist phone booths, Party Line #7 is as informative and enjoyable as always.




Party Line - Issue #8

In this latest installation from the guerilla phone booth collective Futel, the future of telephony is being broken wide open.  Get the rundown on their latest operations, new phone locations, operator logs, an enlightening guide to urban furniture and how Futel fits into this ecosystem, and more.



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