coning - NicheInterests/mistfunk GitHub Wiki

One afternoon in the early summer of let's say 1996, a car full of tabbers stopped at a residential neighbourhood intersection next to a neat stack of orange traffic cones, presumably awaiting collection by city workers after having served their road construction-related purpose. Instead of a city worker emerging from the car, a teenager did, and at the urging of the other occupants of the car, he grabbed the cones and popped them into the trunk. Why did these unruly youths take those traffic cones? Truthfully, they did not even know, themselves, so the most true answer might be "because they were not nailed down". A crime of opportunity, they grabbed the cones under the premise that they would figure out what to do with them later.

They never did figure out what to do with them, but that didn't stop them from becoming hypersensitized to the incredible quantities of unattended traffic cones strewn throughout the urban landscape, and continuing their campaign of collection in the interest of some hypothetical future misallocation.

Stealing traffic cones was undeniably against the law, but at the same time, the cones had clearly already been stolen: a given stack might include one City of Vancouver cone, a City of Surrey one, a BC Tel one and a BC Hydro one. It seemed as though traffic cones were just like atoms of air or water flowing loosely throughout the atmosphere and available to be tapped by whoever needed them when the moment was right. Again, their moment never arrived, but they were sure that the mountains of cones would amount to something.

What can you do with traffic cones? I suppose you can block off traffic. You can block off your street and host an impromptu street party! But let's think bigger. What can you do with a hundred traffic cones? A thousand of them? One proposal was to vehicularly block off the entirety of downtown Vancouver, closing all the bridges and overpasses... just for anarchic kicks. Another, more compelling, proposal was to turn the city into a CPU and use strategically deployed traffic cones to regulate the passage of automobiles through the streets, compelling them to behave like electrons traveling the inside of a circuit. With enough time and effort, a simple program might possibly be run. (More compelling, but insanely more difficult to coordinate and pull off.)

The cone-collecting consortium was unofficially dubbed The Cone Empire, complete with the motto "World domination's gonna be spiffy !"

A teenager's parents eventually discovered a garage filled with traffic cones upon their return from vacation, and the teenager was instructed to return them to where they came from. Stashed in a little-frequented area of private-public space, the cones were, in a sense, released back into the wild, and presumably resumed playing their important role in the urban ecosystem.

Had the teenagers been a little more imaginative, Vancouver might have enjoyed a situation analogous to Glasgow's equestrian Duke of Wellington statue. They might have followed the lead of the Parisian École Centrale's Networking Students' Association and thrust the cone to the same prominence that VLC did. But instead all they had was one crazy summer and, for the rest of their lives, a weird rush of endorphins every time a traffic cone is spotted out in the world.