Looking down the road that is paved with only the best intentions, Sam Biddle at Valleywag says “Techies: Just Leave Homeless People Alone“:
Last year, the tech community was stunned by the realization that teaching a homeless man to code did not solve the larger issues of homelessness and American income inequality. Now, they’ve regrouped, and have a new myopic plan: let’s strap GoPro cameras to the poor.
The name “Homeless GoPro” betrays almost everything you need to know about the project. It’s stupidly uncreative, and yet somehow radically crass… Just like Joel Q. Dropbox enjoys Bay Area sea kayaking or mountain biking on weekends, the homeless of Silicon Valley live a rugged, outdoors, extreme lifestyle. Only they can’t go home at the end of the day, because they have no homes, because they are that fucking extreme. If they’re victims of violence or die from exposure? Hell yeah, brother, even more extreme….
…[S]top thinking we can innovate our way out of one of civilization’s oldest ailments. Poverty, homelessness, and inequality are bigger than any app—thinking software and a portable camera can make a dent is nothing more than indulgence. Your tech isn’t helping. Your worldview is missing the point. If you want to be helpful—and you should be—just give some money or time.
Yeah, I know these guys seriously have nothing but goodwill in their hearts, and yet: Tom Wolfe does not need any more fodder. “There’s an app for that” is an advertising slogan, not a magic wand. Certainly there are DIY projects that can make peoples’ lives better — designing warm, waterproof coats with adaptive storage pockets that can be manufactured locally and distributed to the hardcore ‘shelter averse’ is one I heard about from Seattle. But such projects require paying attention to what the actual human persons you’re attempting to help wants/needs, not what tweaks your own gears…
***********
Apart from (hopefully not) despairing of the human capacity for empathy, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Comrade Jake
Love, love, love the way POTUS is spiking the football.
Culture of Truth
Please have someone give a homeless person a GoPro and have them spend the night on the couch of a dot com billionaire.
kdaug
“actual human persons” v. “deranged psychopathic drug-addled societal rejects” dichotomy.
I don’t have an answer. On the margins, both are true. For a solid chunk, they are only the first.
But I don’t like people approaching my car at the stoplight.
Comrade Jake
Also, anyone else see the new Sorkin parody?
http://www.vulture.com/2014/04/watch-amy-schumers-perfect-aaron-sorkin-parody.html
Awesome!
Mike in NC
I misread that as “Homeless GOP”, and was OK with that. Like Darrell Issa living in a cardboard box on Skid Row.
Calouste
Techies trying to find a problem to solve with the solution they have invented? I sure have never seen that before.
J.Ty
That small group of noisy tech dipshits might get all of the media attention, but there’s actually a lot of good coming out of the massive orgy of wealth too.
Sure there’s a dozen Hipmunks for every actually useful thing like e.g. GiveDirectly or Noisebridge, and 28-year-old anarcho-libertarian-techno-utopians are pretty fun to make fun of, but like, Biddle’s shtick is wearing pretty thin. There’s lots of legit things to criticize about the industry/area–and I’ll be the first one to note that he does that–but…
Blah, sorry, overcaffeinated and whatever, but the important thing is that we should spend more time highlighting the people doing good stuff and less time nutpicking. And yeah there are plenty of nuts around here.
Linda Featheringill
Cool day in Philly, although it looked lovely. Maybe on Saturday, when family is home, I can take my little feet outside.
The whole subject of curing homelessness with technology is rather absurd. Maybe you could cure “cameralessness” by giving GoPro gadgets to folks. But these folks are called homeless because they have no home and they are called hungry because they have no food.
Actually, if they donated the cost of one of those cameras to a food and shelter providing organization, they might actually do some good.
But that would require sense.
SiubhanDuinne
@J.Ty:
Love it.
Violet
What’s going to happen with all the GoPro video? How is that going to help anyone? From the linked article quoting the original statement on the project:
The goal is to build empathy. So that means people have to watch it. What kind of people? Is this going to be required viewing? If not, then it’s by choice and they’re already self-selecting to people who would be interested in the problem of homelessness already.
What a bunch of self-centered wankers. No wonder they’re libertarians.
Keith P
Beats dying your finger to show solidarity or to claim that we’re all homeless now.
J.Ty
I would also like to point out that whatever HomelessGoPro might be claiming to be, it’s still, what, four people with no affiliation to the product and the ability to make a shiny website? Most of the people who work at GoPro are dudebros of the first order, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not *that* bad.
Villago Delenda Est
You’re so cruel. Those are the two things they simply cannot part with. Ever.
Emma
Any bets on how soon they start staging fights?
Baud
@Emma:
The first rule of homeless fight club…
Citizen_X
@J.Ty:
Lolwut? When in human history has “a lot of good” been associated with a “massive orgy of wealth?”
I don’t want their fucking charity. I want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute to human progress to the best of their ability. You don’t get that in highly unequal societies.
Eric U.
Reagan started the homeless problem by emptying the mental hospitals. The hospitals were a disaster, making the people live on the street instead is a bigger disaster. Government action is the answer to this problem.
Tommy
I don’t even know where to start, and I am going to cry before I am done writing this.
I am a single dude. Never married. No kids. I live alone in a five bedroom house. I have so much more than I need.
I used to go to this hipster bar (before that was a term). They let homeless people come in. I took a few back to my house. Said my kitchen was stocked, grab whatever you want. My shower rocks. I got a lot of cloths I’ve not warn in decades, grab something.
What I was stunned by how little interest there was when I offered to help with a resume or to get them a job.
I will never forget this couple. Early 20s. I said to them I followed the Dead in the last 80s for a summer. I get doing different. At what point are you going to realize you can’t live like this the rest of your life?
J.Ty
@Baud: yeah i think that’s every thursday at midnight at 19th and south van ness.
Violet
If you go to the actual site, the following is from “The Backstory”:
So it’s a nice tribute to his uncle and attempt to help others like him. Good for him. But the second sentence of the second paragraph indicates what the real problem is: He suffered from schizophrenia. Like so many homeless people, he’s got a mental health issue. Which so often leads to substance abuse as the person attempts to self-medicate. Proper mental health support in this country would go a long way to helping homeless people. That’s where the real solution lies.
J.Ty
@Citizen_X: “the massive orgy of wealth” in that case was a reference to the silicon valley economic boom(s), and I’m not going to help you figure out some of the good things that have come from that.
Culture of Truth
You did a good thing. Helping people is not always easy.
Tommy
@Violet: Bingo. Mental health issues. My comment above should have noted when I lived in NE DC I used to have to step over homeless people to get out of my house. As a guy from a small midwest town it was so out of anything I understood or had seen I can’t really explain.
I talked to a lot of them. I mean I couldn’t not. A lot if not all needed a lot of help and a shelter, bless their hearts, could not give them the help they needed.
Billy was one of them. Always sat on the stoop across the street from my house (two blocks from Union Station). Maybe he wanted drugs, I don’t know. But anytime I walked past him I came back with a turkey sandwich and water. He seemed to be pretty happy with that.
Tiny Tim
It’s true that a lot of homeless people are homeless by “choice.” They face horribly constrained choices, sure, but they certainly prefer it to putting themselves in “the system” (which isn’t very nice and where they can’t do drugs if that’s an issue) and some do simply prefer living rough to attempting to lead a “normal” life. Again, recognizing that if the best of a normal life you can hope for is scoring as many hours at McD’s as you can so you can give all the money to your landlord every month, then I don’t think this choice is totally nuts.
beltane
The news is telling me that Chelsea Clinton is pregnant. How long until Fox claims it’s all a ruse to deflect attention away from Benghazi?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Tiny Tim:
Have you ever actually been homeless?
Eric U.
@Tommy: I can see my brother being homeless. He probably would learn to cope. He is personable, but between some form of schitzophrenia and autism he is unemployable. If you firmly believe that he is salvageable, like my mother did, it’s incredibly frustrating and nearly impossible to believe that he can’t get a job. He wouldn’t even know how to respond if you offered to help him find a job, that’s simply not part of his reality in the way that we understand it. He just needs a comfortable, low-stress place to live and he will be happy. All the homeless people I have ever met were much worse along the same lines, although I have never lived in a big city
Tommy
@Tiny Tim: Are you high? I mean I don’t now what else to ask in response to that comment. Do some people prefer to live the “homeless lifestyle,” well I guess? Many don’t.
Chris
@Eric U.:
What infuriates me about this is that it’s something we figured out, oh, a friggin century ago give or take a couple decades.
I mean, look, if you’re that big of a dick that you’d really rather destroy yourself and your family rather than suffer the indignity of having to share a safety net with others because they’re black, immigrant, Muslim or just poor, come out and say so. But for fuck’s sake don’t try and tell me that the entire twentieth century didn’t happen.
Tiny Tim
I’m saying they prefer homelessness to their perceived (correct or incorrect) alternatives. I’m not saying they want to be homeless. Drug abuse and mental health issues tend to shrink the time horizon over which decisions can be sensibly made, too.
Judge Crater
The “Death Star”, how soon does it hit? Huh? Our space in the universe has obviously been a mistake.
? Martin
I guess the lesson from the homeless wifi idea didn’t take.
@J.Ty:
Proportional to the wealth, no, there isn’t. Put another way, it would be difficult to develop a less efficient way to turn capital into social good, while still performing a social good.
Baud
Rachel just had the longest windup I’ve ever seen.
Omnes Omnibus
@Tommy:
I didn’t think you were old enough to have been in bars in the ’40s.
raven
@Baud: No shit, I’ve been at a conference all day and am pretty worn out and I kept thinking :”what the hell is she driving at??”
JPL
@raven: I’m actually streaming it and I don’t know.
Tiny Tim
And I am not saying that therefore we should do nothing to help these people. It’s just the case that many homeless do shun shelters except in extreme conditions, and many do prefer being homeless to the best possible alternative options they can envision. I would like to give them better shelters (better temporary options) and better long term options, and you can take all my tax money to do that, but especially in places with nice climates (San Francisco), many of the long term homeless expect to stay that way. Drug addiction and mental illness are big contributors (plenty of people with nice middle class lives have drug addiction and mental illness issues, too, but their life path has provided them with a cushion).
raven
@JPL: Ack, back again after the commercial!!!!! NOOOOOOOO< Nicole Fucking Walllace!!!!!
Mandalay
@Violet:
They are trying to do something in a novel way and it doesn’t meet with the approval of you or Biddle. I get that. But I don’t see that abusing and sneering at folks who are making an effort and have honorable intentions – however misguided – is really justified. Your comment says more about you than them.
dmsilev
@beltane:
I blame Obama.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Obviously the writer is not aware of the Valley’s “12 hours, or how ever long as the job takes” work habit.
The real issue with homelessness in the SF Bay Area is the outrageous cost of housing and the need to pass a drug test and credit check just to get a job. All of that needs to fixed at the goverment level, no amount of Glibertain Jake Baur hackers is going to fix it.
NotMax
Maybe the entrepeneurs can pool some resources to can work up a combination Tomorrowland/Homeless World as an attraction (behind glass, of course).
Habitat for Inhumanity.
Baud
@JPL:
Not Obamacare.
rikyrah
the homeless cannot be fit into a box. sure, there are a lot of mentally ill among the homeless, my heart and mind went to that homeless mother in Arizona who went into a job interview and came out being arrested and her children being taken from her. I can’t let that go either, because there was another story from Arizona of a mother, who was high, and drove off with her infant child on top of the car in the carseat. …
job interview…..
vs
driving off high with an infant child…
there are a lot of homeless, especially women with children, that just need help and a lot of resources to help them get to a stable point in their lives.
being poor is hard. and expensive.
Francis
County-owned SROs (single-room occupancy hotels) are an option. Keeping people who would otherwise be homeless housed actually saves counties money on all the emergency care they’re not providing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
That is covered by the “give some money” part.
jl
Are they giving them the cameras? Can they sell them? Or use them to make some dough (I don’t know how that would work, but I’m sure some homeless person has an idea. Cheap home protection services maybe… could stand outside a house all day broadcasting for five bucks?)
JPL
@raven: haha.. Next up what is she saying. I have no idea but she agrees with Reagan. Grenada better arm cuz they have nothing else.
Baud
@raven:
What a waste of a prime time slot. This might be the worst episode of her show I’ve seen.
Omnes Omnibus
@rikyrah: One of the most useful things that I have seen was an effort to get people to donate reasonably modern good clothing that homeless people could wear to interviews. It is a small thing but one that can net huge results.
raven
@Baud: I think Rachel and Nicole gots something goin, know what I’m sayin?
Mandalay
@? Martin:
Even if we assume/pretend that nobody in technology has ever given a dime of their ill-gotten wealth away, and never given away a minute of their time for nothing, there are still affordable cellphones in the Sahel that are permanently improving the quality of life far more than any charitable foundation or international organization could hope to achieve.
Regardless of the proportionality, what price do you put on that? Priceless I say.
Baud
@raven:
Oh my. What a depressing thought.
JPL
@raven: no..
Annamal
I participated in a local charity IT event that was almost the exact opposite of the really icky social experiment described above.
It was about charities identifying specific IT problems they were having and groups of IT people working together with representatives from those charities to provide a potential solution.
In half the cases the solution was configuring google docs around their problem, not particularly glamorous as coding goes but seriously useful because there are no on-going licensing costs and maintenance was not going to be an on-going cost.
It in no way solved over-riding problems, it just made it a little easier for the local night shelter to track admissions over time.
NotMax
@raven
Here’s hoping Susan doesn’t frequent Balloon Juice.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Eric U.:
I can’t get to it from my phone, but there was a really fascinating article in the LA Times a few months ago about a guy who is the leading amateur scholar on ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics — he’s actually had letters published in some of the journals. He’s also currently incarcerated for manslaughter, because he has severe ADHD and other issues and can’t really cope in the outside world.
We don’t really have a way in this country to help adults who are unable to navigate our incredibly complex society for whatever reason (disability, mental illness, addiction, etc.) If this guy had lived in the Renaissance, he would be a monk studying his books in his room with his needs for food and shelter taken care of by the rest of the group. But there’s nothing for him here.
jl
@Annamal: thanks. That is good to hear.
jayackroyd
@Violet: It’s not like you need footage….
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Annamal:
That seems to be the next big thing in volunteering. The Giant Evil Corporation I work for just started a branch of its volunteer program that links the volunteer’s skills with what the charity needs as far as databases, PR, websites, etc. — basically, people are donating their professional services.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Lawyers are supposed to do at least 40 hours of pro bono work per year. It would be nice if we all did it and if other professions did the same.
Renie
@beltane: Comment of the day!!!
Omnes Omnibus
@Renie: I liked this one.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I was homeless in the Bay Area about twenty years ago. Not a Deadhead, just a bad run of luck and some personal tragedy.
There was nothing tech could have offered me, then or now, that would have changed the situation.
Southern Beale
Nashville just tore down a 135-year-old home to make way for Richard Branson’s new hotel. Progress!
No one saw it coming. We’re all stunned. There was zero heads up on this.
Pissed off as hell right now.
Omnes Omnibus
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Today, I think the big thing would be access to a computer and the internet.
Bob In Portland
From Robert Parry:
Considering that Ukrainian regulars were handing over their APCs and ammo to the protesters, does anyone know if the shooters at the National Guard camp were neo-Nazi militias?
Omnes Omnibus
@Bob In Portland: It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
gian
@Tiny Tim:
I used to work in a town where there was a homeless gentleman who had enough income to live in a cheap apartment if he chose off of disability checks. But his mental illness compelled him to rent storage units instead. he would then fill them literally with trash he collected wandering the streets, and when they were full he’d stop paying and repeat.
if his mental health issues were cared for and he was med compliant he’d be highly likely to spend his time and money doing something else.
RSA
@Annamal:
This is the right way to do it. One of my colleagues worked with a food bank network to arrange for people to find out what was available where and when. Data entry plus text notifications, I think–not at all flashy, but improving people’s lives.
A couple of years ago in a workshop of user interface researchers, we talked about the possibility of mobile devices to help homeless people. But I think everything we came up with was only a minor adjunct to personal relationships, (real) social networks, and satisfying basic necessities. Technology by itself can only be a bandaid.
Gin & Tonic
that overthrew Yanukovych, forcing him to flee for his life.
Poor baby was so frightened for his life that he spent three days packing up his stuff before having his personal staff fly him out of the country in a government helicopter. Three days, incidentally, in which he spent the days negotiating with the Maidan protest leaders, and evenings at his multi-million-dollar home packing. Sheer terror, it must have been.
Violet
@Mandalay:
The guy has good intentions and personal experience with his uncle being homeless, as I pointed out and quoted in various comments. His way of trying to help seems ridiculous to me. It’s very tech-centric and I cannot see how it is going to change anything or help the homeless in any way. If you visit his website there’s a page of links to various organizations helping the homeless that he says are “essential.” So why not just work with one of those? They’re already there.
He says his organization is designed to “build empathy”. People don’t already have empathy for the homeless? You see the homeless person waiting on your corner or asking for money while you wait at a stoplight and you don’t have empathy? Seriously? Who doesn’t? And if you don’t, are you the kind of person motivated to look at a video?
The whole thing seems very well-intentioned and he’s eager to help but he’s requiring anyone interested in helping to take two steps: first they have to watch a video, then they build empathy from that. Only after that, I guess, do they do anything to help–donate money or time or something else.
What about working with some of the better established organizations? What about lobbying for better mental health services? What about things that could actually change the situations that create homelessness? That’s barely covered on his website and seems wrong to me, as does fitting people with cameras that are usually used for showing off exploits. It seems exploitative of the homeless people rather than helping them. Which is why I say it’s a self-centered way of looking at the problem.
Bob In Portland
@Omnes Omnibus: It would be irresponsible not to report. No one’s reported on it.
Bob In Portland
@Gin & Tonic: Gin, was that from the Kiev press? Did John Brennan rubber-stamp that? You know that everyone but the coup government and John Kerry and USA Today know that the Jewish registration flyer was a hoax. Right?
You like Parubiy?
J.Ty
@? Martin: yeah no you’re thinking about finance. The multiplier on tech is huge. If you’re saying that the government should confiscate tax dollars from rich people and use them to altruistically invest in tech research, I agree, by the way.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Southern Beale: That house was 5 years old when my grandfather was born in Nashville.
mclaren
That article really illustrates the Eichmannesque sociopathy of America’s blame-the-victim culture.
If someone is homelss, it must because of something that person did. So teach that homeless guy to code! Give him a GoPro! Give him a smartphone!
No one seems to contemplate the possibility that the rich tech guys may have gotten rich because they happened to be born to the right parents and wound up in the right place at the right time. Or that the homeless person is homeless most likely s/he chose the wrong parents and was born with a mental illness and wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time and now lives under a freeway overpass in a cardboard box.
DC
@Southern Beale: The hotel is almost certainly a much more efficient use of the space. What is this fascination with old, but not particularly useful, things? This attitude of never-replace-anything drives the high cost of housing in many cities in this country.
Phoning It In
@Violet: I can get my emotional tourism using my own two feet, if I must. What this GoPro thing really does is enable the voyeurs to voyage without actually having the experience; they just watch it on TV.
I found this on Amazon: To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov.
The rest is silence.
Annamal
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
I could see this kind of volunteering go wrong very easily, IT professionals have a tendency towards wandering off tangent and using neat technology instead of thinking about simpler solutions that would be easier for their clients to maintain over time.
It didn’t for this weekend (it was only one weekend and nobody was under any obligation to use what was produced) but I could see potential problems if larger organisations got involved.