If it happened, it would have been one of John Street‘s only lasting non-embarrassing legacies. But plenty of things got in the way, and as it stands now, Philly Chief Information Officer Terry Phillis says that there’s about a 75% percent chance that Earthlink will bail from the project within a year. And this is where the scary movie analogies come in. Imagine, if you will, that Philly WiFi is a beautiful little girl, once full of promise and love and free (or cheap) connectivity for everyone. Well, right now, that little girl has been possessed by Satan for the last six months, and right now, we’re in the part of the movie where the girl’s priest and family have surrounded her bedside, trying to perform a bootleg exorcism on the child as she projectile vomits green goo all over and is making the lights go on and off. Now see, if the priest (who in this case could be Phillis, we suppose) can drive out the evil spirit so that the girl lives — along with the nearly completed citywide network of wifi nodes — we will have vanquished evil once and for all, and the city can walk away having pocketed the network on someone else’s dime, we all prevail. But not so fast: Just as easily, the goo-spreading Satanic beast could win out, sell the network to whoever, and the cycle could begin anew. (The beast could die in that case too, and become a standup outfit that brings the original Glenda-The-Good-Witch vision of the project back to life, but you’d have to wait ’til the end of the sequel to find out.) So to wrap it up: It could go either way, and then it could wind back around and go either way again. See? I mean, that’s just what a horror movie is.
Computer World: Out, Damn Beast, Out!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 5:55 pm.