Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Life among the homeless bloggers

Cory Doctorow at 4:17 am Thu, Jun 22, 2006

— FEATURED —

Science

Last chance to enter the Armchair Taxonomist challenge!

Book Review

We Can Fix it! - a graphic novel time travel memoir

Science

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Book Review

Odd Duck: great picture book about eccentricity and ducks

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle
Wired News covers the homeless blogger scene, talking to homeless people around the USA who use scrounged laptops and other computers, open WiFi networks, and library connections to get online, start businesses, express themselves -- even panhandle via PayPal.

Happy Ivy doesn't have a bathroom or a kitchen in the bus he calls home. He does, however, have a video-editing station.

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he's managed to run a 'round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados...

Nearly all homeless people have e-mail addresses, according to Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. "More have e-mail than have post office boxes," Stoops said. "The internet has been a big boon to the homeless."

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.

Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Comments are closed.