One thing that’s remained surprisingly resilient in the face of technological change is the prank call. But... how?
Crank Yankers. Photo: YouTube The digital revolution has left plenty of once-beloved formats broken and twitching on the floor, from CDs and newspapers to brick-and-mortar retail chains. But one thing that’s remained surprisingly resilient in the face of technological change is the prank call.
But that assumes prank calls are even still relevant. Because honestly: How the hell do you make a prank call in 2019? Things have changed drastically since their 1990s and early 2000s heyday. Blocked numbers and ignored voicemails are routine. The U.S. government’s own, actual propaganda chokes news feeds, while swatting, doxxing, and deep fakes are increasing fixtures of online life.
“Whoever invented the prank call was braver than today’s bored teens,” wrote Cara Giaimo in Atlas Obscura, referencing the work of historian Paul Collins. “All [early] calls were routed through operators,” Collins wrote in 2011, “and the most anonymity one could get was in the payphones prominently displayed in drugstores and hotel lobbies.”
As phone technology got smaller and smarter in the late ’90s and early 2000s, pranking took on newly sinister dimensions — a trend paralleled by the gleeful exploitation of shows like Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d. Anonymous phone calls can carry lethal portent, horror film after horror film warned, from Scream to The Ring to Don’t Hang Up.
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