The global population includes a diasporic multitude of refugees and migrants as well as a multitude of homeless individuals, families and children who lack full assimilation into their countries. “Home” for all of us is an inevitably problematic space, but to be without a home in a home-centered culture is both a traumatic experience and a defining legal state. In most countries a home address is expected—and in many cases required—for full citizenship.
Zygmunt Bauman has famously described these mobile populations as “human waste”: “redundant” humans who are “superfluous” products or “side effects” of contemporary societies’ quest for order and economic progress (Bauman 2007). Despite their numbers and the attention advocates have brought to these populations, the homeless, like the aging (see Crow and Sawchuk’s chapter in this volume), have been left out of not only most statistical studies generated by the Internet and wireless industries, but also by most critical studies on media uses and practices.
In their January 2012 annual point-in-time (“snapshot”) count, The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development found that 634,000 people across America were homeless. Because of turnover in the homeless population, the total number of people who experience homelessness for at least a few nights during the course of a year is known to be considerably higher than snapshot counts. A 2010 study estimated the actual number of such people to be between 2.3 million and 3.5 million. Thirty-nine percent of the homeless population is young people under eighteen, and each year over 800,000 children and youth in the United States experience homelessness (National Alliance to End Homelessness 2009).
This chapter takes up many of the themes of our book: the politics of mobility and immobility; Internet connectivity as a material practice and complex social marker; neoliberalism as governmentality; and the interplay of competing technological and social imaginaries. The chapter engages these themes by employing the logic and methods of assemblage. Its subject is homelessness with the beginning of an emphasis—assemblages can be built on and grow to any length—on homeless school-age children and youth in the United States.
I start with a large-scale event that took place in Austin, Texas, in March 2012, an “experiment” that embodies—as does Darin Barney’s example in this volume’s first chapter—complications around the moral valorization of mobility and the wireless Internet as well as the cultural designation of mobile access to communication networks as a expression of and near synonym for both “privilege” and “freedom.” Social imaginaries, as the contributors to this volume have emphasized, are not only a set of ideas about the social world, but they are also pragmatic templates for social practice. In this way, social imaginaries, as the case below illustrates, enable particular activities and discourses and constrain others. Imaginaries provide a map of the social as a moral space.
At South by Southwest (SXSW)—an annual music and interactive media showcase that attracts fifty thousand attendees—BBH, a global advertising agency, staged what the company called “Homeless Hotspots: A Charitable Innovation.” The agency’s website states that BBH explores “emerging platforms and behaviors on behalf of brands,” and here is how this particular “innovation” was described by BBH:
This year in Austin, as you wonder between locations murmuring to your coworker about how your connection sucks and you can’t download/stream/tweet/instagram/check-in, you’ll notice strategically positioned individuals wearing “Homeless Hotspot” t-shirts. These are homeless individuals in the Case Management program at Front Steps Shelter. They’re carrying MiFi devices. Introduce yourself, then log on to their 4G network via your phone or tablet for a quick high-quality connection. You pay what you want and whatever you give goes directly to the person that just sold you access.
(BBH Global n.d.)
Not surprisingly, “Homeless Hotspots” had its defenders who, especially in brief comments on Twitter and Facebook, found the experiment “a great model” and “inspirational.” Some longer-form critics also found things—more subtle things—to like. P. J. Rey writes:
The Internet backbone—especially urban wireless infrastructure—generally exists as a series of nodes not remarked on, or massive nondescript buildings housing server farms just outside the attention of urban knowledge workers like myself. I don’t need to know how it happens. The infrastructural activity that undergirds so much of my work and life goes on whether I notice it or not. What’s interesting about BBH’s efforts is that they bring the infrastructure directly into focus with mobile hotspots that you must see, name, and approach. I think the short-term publicity stunt may address the invisibility of the homeless. BBH is asking us to accept homelessness as a feature of a wireless urban landscape to be navigated.
(Rey n.d.)
Newspapers, including the New York Times, reported on the event and the controversy surrounding the event only briefly and in a supposedly “objective” way (and in their back pages). But there was a strong backlash among some critics who considered how the experiment fit into broader political-economic currents. At the core, many comments were critiques of the strand of neoliberal ideology that prizes maximum private sector innovation. But a few also addressed the human infrastructure issues raised above. Dan Greene wrote:
Homelessness, a clear sign of the US urbanism’s structural failures, does not disappear, but is refigured into a cleaner, more productive interface for tech entrepreneurs—the new face of the city. Cross-class contact is reintroduced, but technologized and thus neutralized, shorn of risk or surprise … It’s not merely that homeless people fail to directly benefit from the thing they are being put to work producing but that this form of wage labor, guised as charity, also happens to be completely unregulated. That is to say, the homeless hotspots scheme takes exploitation to extremes. What are the consequences of living a society that acquiesces the fact that its constituents are not even guaranteed $60 for a hard day’s work because their service is classified as charity and not as proper labor? What happens to the already vastly disproportionate distribution of wealth if companies can supplant their workforce with so-called charity cases?
(Greene n.d.)
Debates central to Theories of the Mobile Internet: Materialities and Imaginaries are present in these and other comments about “Homeless Hotspots: A Charitable Innovation.” As part of a new mobilities paradigm, these debates over the mobile Internet continue to generate new discussions and provisional answers to questions that are themselves new.
I want to take up here one of the conceptual touchstones for Theories of the Mobile Internet: the conceit of assemblages. I’ll start by noting that most of this chapter is an assemblage or the start at an assemblage that experiments with the form of the academic article. It does not proceed in traditionally linear fashion and does not make an explicit argument. Instead, it engages the contingent, the associative and the intertextual by linking items that include newspaper reports, policy statements, popular representations, academic writing, lyrics to a song and other materials I’ve collected in the last few years. The chapter does so in part because I believe a piecemeal, fragmented approach to writing mirrors my topic: the fragmented lives of the homeless. But there are more important reasons as well.
Among the tutor texts for my approach to writing this chapter is John Law’s (2004) book, After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, in which he argues that assemblages are ways of “apprehending or appreciating displacement. Each fragment is a possible image of the world, of our experience of the world, but so too is their combination.” Manuel DeLanda’s work, building on Deleuze’s theory of assemblages, also informs my approach to writing this chapter. DeLanda argues that the components in assemblages are defined by their material dimension and territorializing and deterritorializing axis. “The components in assemblages,” he has noted,” are historically contingent, heterogeneous and self-subsistent, giving the possibility to take one assemblage and insert it into another without destroying its identity. The main characteristics of the relationship between an assemblage and its components are complexity and non-linearity” (DeLanda 2006). Finally, two additional sources offered stylistic models: Roland Barthes’s late work—in which he deploys fragments as a series of interruptions with cumulative intellectual and aesthetic surprises—and literary and visual assemblage s as both artistic processes and products in which new images and texts are primarily and explicitly constructed from existing ones.
It is hardly news to say that over the last few decades interdisciplinary methods previously thought of as peripheral to “serious” academic research have become increasingly visible in many fields. Language- and image-based stylistic interventions appear occasionally in our academic journals, including poems, personal narratives and photographs intended to function as arguments or critiques. Following Barthes (1975) then, who argued that one cannot produce new ways of doing criticism without changing the structures that govern it, and Law, who argues “we will need to teach ourselves to know some of the realities of the world using methods usual to or unknown in social science,” my writing here begins an assemblage that could grow, if space allowed, in a number of different directions. Like many assemblages of the kind I am describing, this one on homelessness and digital connectivity is provisional and generative; it does not intend to make a specific argument but rather to serve as an alternative heuristic.
My ad hoc process of collecting, selecting, arranging, titling and editing multiple representations of and discourses about “homelessness” and “mobility” over time is meant to emphasize the ad hoc and active meanings of these terms and to help articulate the range of actors, concepts, practices, and relations at work in the production of these terms as concepts. The texts I reproduce and remix demonstrate that the meanings of individual fragments are constructed not only within the social and media-specific context in which they first appeared, but also through their relationships with other texts that resonate, sometimes broadly, within culture. Assemblages are emergent; in what follows, individual fragments are overlapping and iterative while the structure of the whole attempts to pay attention to unintended effects.
I’ve generally titled the sections of my assemblage by borrowing a word or phrase from the passage that follows, except when the passage seemed to deny me a summative or provocative title. In those cases, I’ve invented my own. Many of the fragments are verbatim, although typically snipped from larger blocks of prose, and some are edited for clarification by the internal logic of this assemblage which is, as a whole, guided by a spirit of poesis.
Wireless mobile Internet connectivity brings profound changes to many aspects of life, including in some cases greater inequality as well as more social and economic polarization. Homeless individuals are sites traversed by complicated and often competing discursive paths; they are also human subjects, bodies routed and rerouted, directed and misdirected by circumstances every day. How does digital connectivity and the wireless Internet change these circumstances? In a few of the following passages, themes related to a specific place (Minneapolis, Minnesota) begin to emerge in this assemblage. Minneapolis figures for several reasons: I live in the city’s downtown area and urban homelessness is visible to me. I read frequent accounts in the local media about both homelessness and the city’s wireless infrastructure. Finally, the Minneapolis public school district has been recognized by Time magazine and other sources as a national “model” for school districts struggling with meeting the needs, including the wireless Internet needs, of homeless students. Ironically, in the context of this chapter, these young people are often officially referred to as “highly mobile” students in policy and legal documents.
Poverty means being excluded from whatever passes for normal life. This results in loss of self-esteem. Poverty also means being cut off from the chances of whatever passes in a given society for a happy life. This results in resentment.
In a consumer society a normal life is the life of consumers, preoccupied with making their choices among the panoply of publicly displayed opportunities for pleasurable sensations and lively experiences. A happy life is defined by catching many opportunities, catching the opportunities most talked about and thus most desired.
Those in poverty are unable to participate as fully fledged consumers. They are marginalized and made to feel inadequate. They live in a surround of force that differentiates them from those inside the circle of power.
Within the surround of force, people live in panic. They scurry, going from place to place, looking for food, a new apartment, medical care for a child. The wall of the surround pens them into a limited area, but the panic inside the surround has no limits; people may do nothing and everything, suffering from excesses of both order and liberty.
In other words there are no constants within the surround, no reason, no stability, and no rules; there is only force (Bauman 2007).
When researching the relationship between mobility and homelessness it is important to consider how fixity is not always mobility’s opposite, rather some people become fixed in mobility (Jackson 2012).
The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimates that, because of the recession, as many as a two million additional Americans have become homeless in the last two years. For lower-income working families, it means one poor decision can rapidly deteriorate into a maelstrom of debt and financial problems.
Many of the newly homeless do not fit the stereotype of homelessness. They may be hard-working, healthy and addiction-free (National Alliance to End Homelessness 2009).
Homeless Hotspots@HHSXSW
Our Hotspot Managers are excited (and a bit nervous), so if you’re in town tomorrow come say hi and make them feel at home. #SxSW
(BBH Global n.d.)
For the homeless, mobile devices are not viewed as being a tool for recreation or a status symbol, but a survival device. The media talks about teens, young adults, moms and even senior citizens engaging in social media, but little is ever discussed around the homeless and how they are using digital technology such as mobile or social media.
People turn to Facebook to post their gripes; they receive support and advice from friends and others who can relate. For the homeless, social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and even email are used to maintain life-saving connections. For the homeless, a simple cell phone can be a vital link to a family member, support group, employment and housing opportunities, and is a way to build a community out of the isolation, ruin and despair that accompanies homelessness. A mobile phone offers the disenfranchised a cheap way to communicate, basic Internet access can connect them to a wealth of information and resources (Johns n.d.).
During the March 6 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh, discussing a photo of Michelle Obama’s March 5 visit to a Washington, DC, homeless shelter that featured a man photographing Obama using a cell phone, said that “the homeless and the poor are showing up taking pictures of her with their cell phones.” Limbaugh later added:
What we have, ladies and gentlemen, is a giant welfare state that’s in the process of being manufactured. Like, you’re going to have to see the first lady behind the counter at McDonald’s when you go in there as your poverty-stricken day drags on—take a picture with your cell phone while you go in there and get your McNuggets or whatever’s being handed out that day.
(Bruck n.d.)
A USC School of Social Work study revealed three-in-five homeless teens have cell phones and wireless access.
“Why can’t I be on Facebook?” asked one subject in the study. “I have as much right to that as anyone else. Just because I am homeless does not mean that I don’t care about this stuff, you know? My family is on Facebook. My friends are on Facebook. People who care about me are on Facebook.”
(Johns n.d.)
A federal program designed to help homeless and other impoverished people connect with family, friends, housing programs and potential employers could provide potentially millions of poor people with free cell phones and service.
The program has come under fire from some Republicans, who cite it as an example of government largesse. Opponents have labeled the devices “Obama phones,” even though the initial program was created under President Ronald Reagan and expanded to include cell phones during the George W. Bush administration. Congressman Tim Griffin (R-Ark.) recently introduced a bill aimed at gutting the program (Hubert n.d.).
Whereas the new mobilities paradigm offers a rather loose framework for scholars seeking to engage with mobility research, there have been recent attempts at greater theorization. Tim Cresswell’s work possibly represents the most sophisticated theoretical endeavor.
Cresswell posits that mobility has three interconnected dimensions—movement, meaning and practice—which combine into different “constellations of mobility” and shape the “politics of mobility.”
First of all, mobilities are about movement. Movement is closely related to place, as mobility happens in places and through places. Movement is itself made of different dimensions that Cresswell identifies as purpose, velocity, rhythm, route and spatial scale.
Second, mobilities are meaningful, that is, they do not take place in a vacuum but in socially and culturally constructed systems of meaning. Mobilities mean different things to different people in different societal, cultural and historical contexts. For instance, the same journey between two specific locations acquires very different meanings in different contexts such as tourism and immigration. In other words, mobilities are a relational phenomenon.
Third, mobilities are practiced. This means that the experience of movement may be extremely different depending on a number of factors. Under diverse circumstances, the practice of moving may range from being an exhilarating experience to being a boring routine or a life-threatening adventure. Mobilities are an experiential phenomenon (Söderström 2010).
A twenty-eight-page pictorial in the September issue of W magazine, shot by the British photographer Craig McDean, repurposes shopping bags from labels like Chanel and Dior as makeshift dresses, and shows them worn with furs and pearls and designer bags. As she prepared for her debut runway show on Friday, Erin Wasson, a model turned designer, seconded Mr. Duffy’s view that the professionals could take some tips from the homeless, and she defended remarks she made last year in an interview with Nylon magazine: “The people with the best style for me are the people that are the poorest.” “It’s not like I’m saying, ‘Oh, God, that’s so inspiring—you got your clothes from a garbage can,’” Ms. Wasson said.
What is she saying then? “When I moved down to Venice Beach, I found these people with this amazing mentality, this gypsy mentality—people that you couldn’t label and put in a box” (Trebay 2009).
Drawing on Raymond Williams’s terminology, we note the emergence of a mobilities “structure of feeling.” But those who have emphasized global flows have been criticized for neglecting the “short haul.” The importance of everyday, slower movement is inescapable when considering the lives of young homeless people. Massey argues: “Much of life, for many people, even in the heart of the First World, still consists of waiting with your shopping for a bus that never comes.”
But this critique risks reinforcing the idea that movement belongs to the privileged whereas the poor are imagined as living slower, more fixed lives. Within this schema, distance from global flows equals disadvantage, and yet, strangely, homelessness is often also associated with perpetual movement (American Sociological Association 2012).
In “Night of the Living Homeless,” an episode of Comedy Central’s South Park, homeless people have been showing up in South Park in large numbers. The town council has taken notice of the problem and come up with some solutions—turning the homeless into tires for their cars or giving them designer sleeping bags and makeovers “so they would at least be pleasant to look at” (Wikipedia 2014).
A computer lab inside a homeless services nonprofit is not the usual place for a tech industry press conference, but it is sobering, and it may be the most powerful. Downstairs, the rain poured down intermittently outside as homeless and low-income people waited in line to eat.
San Francisco’s officials want the mobile site to be a symbol of what could be in a place where tech, and those who have supported tech businesses through tax cuts, is vilified.
The Link-SF site, accessible on the Web but optimized for mobile phones, is pegged as a “Yelp-like” site for homeless services. Users can look up resources for food, shelter, medical services and places to access showers or technology (Tam 2014).
With unemployment and foreclosures rising and growing numbers of families struggling to find affordable housing, lawmakers in Congress are debating who should be counted as homeless. For more than twenty years, federal housing law has counted as homeless only people living on the streets or in shelters.
In the House, which is expected to vote on the issue in May, lawmakers are discussing whether to expand the definition to include children and their families in desperate need of stable housing—about one million people—or to add a much smaller group that would include only people fleeing their homes because of domestic violence and those who can prove they will lose their housing within fourteen days.
The Senate is considering a still narrower expansion that would include only those who have been forced to move three times in one year or twice in twenty-one days. None of the bills come with any additional financing (Swarns 2008).
Zio yami, zio yami, nhliziyo yami
Nhliziyo yami amakhaza asengi bulele
Homeless, homeless
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake
(Simon 1986)
During the last few decades, the face of homelessness has changed as families with children have begun to use emergency shelters in the Twin Cities and across the country. School access is known to be a major problem for highly mobile students and children lacking a stable home address due to residency requirements, lack of transportation and missing records (Kingsbury 2009).
Benson Rollins wants a college degree. The unemployed high school dropout who attends Alcoholics Anonymous and has been homeless for ten months is being courted by the University of Phoenix. Two of its recruiters got themselves invited to a Cleveland shelter last October and pitched the advantages of going to the country’s largest for-profit college to seventy destitute men.
Rollins’s experience is increasingly common. The boom in for-profit online education, driven by a political consensus that all Americans need more than a high school diploma, has intensified efforts to recruit the homeless. Such disadvantaged students are desirable because they qualify for federal grants and loans, which are largely responsible for the prosperity of for-profit colleges (Golden 2010).
Right now, nearly one in ten children attending public school in Minneapolis is homeless. Read that sentence again.
As Wall Street tries to right itself, the global economic crisis is punishing many of the youngest Americans. Preliminary nationwide figures indicate that there were nearly 16 percent more homeless students in the 2007–08 academic year than in the previous year, and the number of homeless students continues to climb as more parents face foreclosure or the unemployment line. Over the past two decades, Minneapolis’s thirty-three thousand-student district has seen a steady increase in the number of homeless kids, as the Twin Cities area has hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs and the supply of affordable housing has dwindled (Kingsbury 2009).
Assemblage theory is an approach to systems analysis that emphasizes fluidity, exchangeability and multiple functionalities. Assemblages appear to be functioning as a whole, but are actually coherent bits of a system whose components can be “yanked” out of one system, “plugged” into another and still work. As such, assemblages characteristically have functional capacities but do not have a function—that is, they are not designed to only do one thing (Texas Theory Wiki n.d.).
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