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| Let them Eat Code |
their repulsion, and disregard for the very real problems plaguing hundreds of thousands of homeless people in the United States, channeled an insensitivity that’s native to a subset of successful businesspeople who believe they secured their venture capital or their hot wives because of merit and not luck, privilege, or circumstance.
Luck, privilege and circumstance.
The test is to have these things and reject them. Imagine a state of being spiteful and always chaotically rejecting the path of exorbitant wealth. Given an option for money, you reject it, deeming your current life and needs satisfactorily provided for. The impulse is to accept immediately, and then put that money toward accruing things.
In this article we see the most impoverished. This isn’t an option for them. Every gain in wealth, is directly mapped to satisfying a need that isn’t being provided for. Most wealth, in excess, creates only a deeper hole for the self. There’s a weight to the house. The house must itself be fed.
It’s hard to tell exactly when this obsession with the homeless began.
It seems certain of these solutions are treated like problem solving, with the usual expected solution of generating money for the creators. You solve homeless, with your startup and your startup gets rich. What about a business that purely gives?
That year, the “innovation lab” of an ad agency at the festival decided to improve Internet access around Austin with a novel “hack”: employing homeless people as Internet providers. The firm carefully vetted individuals from a pool of homeless locals; attached small devices to them that allowed users to connect to the web through the 4G phone network; and gave them T-shirts to wear while they stood, sat, or walked around. One of these shirts read, “I’m Clarence, a 4G hotspot,” followed by a number to text to donate money. The size of the donation was up to the wireless user’s discretion, but the suggested sum was $2 per fifteen minutes.
If homeless people are pre-social, then society is off the hook for their poverty, so long as it imagines a way for the individual to hack his or her own story and emerge victorious—even “movie-poster worthy.” That’s why these concerned engineers don’t help the homeless by dreaming up new models for public housing, or trusting homeless people with a significant sum of money, or giving them other goods that would immediately alleviate their difficulties. Nor do they lobby their local or state representatives to fix policies that don’t do enough to help the problem.