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Kind: captions
Language: en

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- In August 2001,

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the press descended on the town of
Bury St Edmunds in south-east England.

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The mayor was going to unveil

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the world's first Internet Bench
here in the Abbey Gardens.

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I'm not sitting on the bench
for a couple of reasons.

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One, I can't get close-ups of
it while I'm sitting on it,

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and two, it looks like quite a lot
of the local bird life

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has been perched above it recently.

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Anyway, "internet bench" sounds ridiculous,

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but you have to remember in
2001, there were no smartphones.

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Wifi did technically exist,
but it wasn't widespread.

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And mobile internet was limited
to a few specially coded,

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tiny black and white sites,

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which could be accessed
slowly and expensively

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on just a few models of phone.

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If you wanted an internet
connection in 2001,

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your computer had to
be plugged in somehow,

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you couldn't just expect to
check your email in a park,

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and thus: the Internet Bench.

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A bench with sockets you could
plug your computer's modem into,

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and dial up to the
internet over a phone line.

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Which is weird, right?

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'Cause surely the sensible
thing to do, even back then,

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would've been to have
one internet connection,

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maybe an ADSL line,

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and then share it like a
regular corporate network,

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just plug in an ethernet cable
and you'd have a connection.

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But no, you had to use a phone cable,
and your laptop would have to dial

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a regular landline phone number
to connect to... well. Who?

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Launch day photos make it very clear
who you were supposed to connect to,

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or at least it would,
if the mayor had realised

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which way up stickers
need to be on a laptop.

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This was all a publicity stunt for MSN,
the Microsoft Network.

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And there are some very nice
quotes from MSN staff

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in the BBC article about it,

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which were probably pasted
straight from the press release.

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In truth, this wasn't
really an internet bench,

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it was a bench with a couple
of phone extensions run to it,

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and that was it.

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For a three-month trial period,

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you could dial up to your own
internet account from here,

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and it didn't take long before some
local tech-savvy teenagers worked out

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there wasn't any block on the numbers
you could call from here.

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The bench just had a
few phone sockets

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wired into the exchange
at Microsoft's expense.

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So, of course, they made a couple of
international calls for free

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and tried to get through to Bill Gates.

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They didn't manage it,

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but they did get a nice
write-up in the local paper.

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And one of the most wonderful
early-2000s posed photos I have ever seen.

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From a technical standpoint,
this bench was a disaster,

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but MSN were probably happy with it.

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They'd have been happy with
the teenage hackers, as well.

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It got their company
name in the paper again.

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They're probably still
happy with this video,

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even as I tell you it was a terrible
half-assed idea. Because what it did,

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and what it's still doing,

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was get their name and logo
in front of an audience.

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They just want to be noticed.

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That's one of the dirty secrets
of public relations.

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If you want to get the
attention of the press,

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if you want your brand
in front of the world,

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you don't have to actually
make something good,

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or useful, or sensible, or that even
works like you said it would.

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The truth is malleable.

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You just have to tell
a story that resonates,

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get the press in to take some pictures,

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and figure they don't know enough about
the subject to ask technical questions.

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And then after you've
got those column inches,

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or these days, the retweets and clicks,

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you can basically abandon
the whole project.

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The public are fine with it.
It's a silly story that doesn't matter.

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The press are fine with it.

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They've got content and
sold the adverts around it,

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and it doesn't matter if
it gets ripped apart later,

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as long as it doesn't kill or maim anyone,
then you got your free advertising.

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And we've seen this
time after time after time.

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Heck, I've done this
occasionally in the past.

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That's not even the same bench, actually.

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It's the right location,

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but it's been swapped
out for a different one

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with a couple of plaques on it
and no phone sockets.

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But then, the bench working
was never the point.

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This wasn't about connecting
the town of Bury St Edmunds

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or blazing a trail into the future,

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it was about getting cheap advertising.

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And here I am, 20 years later,
still giving them that,

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because World's First Internet Bench
still gets attention.

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Oh, someone sat in it.