Love/Hate
How a Phone Glitch Sparked a Teenage Riot
When kids turned a state-owned telecom system into a proto-Internet, police cracked down with brutal force
On a Friday night in September 1982, teenagers poured out of the Fridhemsplan metro station. First just a few dozen, then hundreds, and soon more than a thousand of them filled the station’s hall, the sidewalk, and the road outside. Eventually, they walked three blocks south to Rålambshovsparken, entering the grassy Stockholm park via a concrete pedestrian bridge.
“They were everywhere,” said police superintendent Kjell Andersson. “They were on top of the bus shelter, in the trees, on the roofs of the polling huts, and on the electrical poles.” The teenagers had come from all over Stockholm and its surrounding towns. They weren’t drunk or stoned. They didn’t have placards or a cause. They weren’t protesting or demonstrating. They were there simply because they’d agreed to go there. And many of them had come to Rålambshovsparken to see people they knew but had never met in person.
The teenagers didn’t have long to find each other. After an hour or so, the police arrived, not exactly sure what to do with a group of a thousand teenagers who had suddenly appeared, with no clear reason to be there. Sweden’s…
