Someone in Colorado smoked a lot of weed when they came up with a political payphone concept. Boulder residents designing interventions for places that they imagine, rather than understand, is a pretty good microcosm of how a lot of heavily funded “depolarization” work operates.

What strikes me is the actual interesting finding, that political geography doesn’t hold, gets treated as a quirky anecdote in The Guardian rather than evidence that the entire project’s premise is flawed.

A “call a Republican” phone in the Bay Area connected someone to a Green Party voter. What are they smoking?

Seriously, one of the first documented calls connects the Bay Area to the supposedly Republican stronghold of Abilene, Texas. A Green Party member answers and says they may be switching to Socialism (Peace and Freedom).

That’s the real story.

Meanwhile, the fact that this cannabis-laced Colorado biotech marketing campaign bought phones off Facebook Marketplace, for recording conversations to share online “around the end of January”, suggests tone-deaf content generation always was the point. Matter Neuroscience really wants to matter. But what matters most from the story so far is that geography is not ideology.

SF Gate offers far better analysis, exposing that $26 million has been raised to tell people talking feels good. The stunt claims 3.8 million views while generating roughly 2 phone users per hour. The official spokesperson? A Marketing VP. No science intended or achieved.