Boing Boing » homelessness

At SXSW, homeless people become WiFi hotspots

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:49:23 +0000

Over the weekend, I noticed that David Gallagher of The New York Times observed in Austin, "Homeless people have been enlisted to roam the streets wearing T-shirts that say 'I am a 4G hotspot.”

A number of other folks I follow on Twitter who are attending the annual SXSW event there mentioned it, too, with concern. Here's the project's website, detailing their system to PayPal each "homeless hotspot" person directly. "We suggest $2 per 15 minutes."

The project was created by a team at global ad agency BBH.

Jon Mitchell at RWW has more. The problem, as he sees it:

The Homeless Hotspots website frames this as an attempt "to modernize the Street Newspaper model employed to support homeless populations." There's a wee little difference, though. Those newspapers are written by homeless people, and they cover issues that affect the homeless population. By contrast, Homeless Hotspots are helpless pieces of privilege-extending human infrastructure. It's like it never occurred to the people behind this campaign that people might read street newspapers. They probably just buy them to be nice and throw them in the garbage.

Tim Carmody at Wired News has more about the project's roots, and why he and others find it troubling:

This is my worry: the homeless turned not just into walking, talking hotspots, but walking, talking billboards for a program that doesn’t care anything at all about them or their future, so long as it can score a point or two about digital disruption of old media paradigms. So long as it can prove that the real problem with homelessness is that it doesn’t provide a service.

Homeless robot begs for energy

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:14:34 +0000

Pawel Hynek's 2006 image "Obsolete" depicts a homeless robot begging for electrical power; it's striking and funny as well as a little uncomfortable-making. It reminds me of one of the most demented scenes in science fiction history: the moment in Ian McDonald's stupendous novel The Broken Land in which a re-animated severed head is reduced to performing sexual favors on a street-corner in exchange for nutrient bath to fill the shallow dish in which its neck-stump rests.

Obsolete (via JWZ)

The Troll Under the Bridge, social justice edition

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:01:12 +0000

Robbo Mills sends in this episode of his Rufus the Dog kids' show, a social justice-oriented retelling of "The Troll Under the Bridge." He says,

Social justice and kids TV puppet shows don't seem a likely mix but we managed to make it work for a bunch of our episodes before it got cancelled. We made these shows for YTV Canada and after recently getting the rights back we started putting them online - under a CC share-alike license - where they'll have a home and reach kids.
We're also making new shows with the same characters - and the first one out of the gate is our own daft version of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". Funding for this is being raised through IndieGoGo and we're hell bent on getting it done and online before the holidays. And yes - there WILL be Tiny Tim and there WILL be a Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Troll Under The Bridge - Ruffus The Dog (Thanks, Robbo!)