but the other thing that is happening that i also find quite interesting is that sxsw created this thing where regular people actually have to look at homeless people. it must be at least a little strange to have to read a password off of the body of a homeless man in order to add functionality to your multi-hundred dollar device, no? i’m convinced that this moment of discomfort has to be important (although for reasons i will have a hard time articulating). i almost wish there wasn’t a way to immediately donate once connected because i worry that this action might relieve this discomfort too readily.

so what do you think about this? there is something about how we construct the figure of the homeless man or woman, how we understand homeless bodies, where and when these bodies are expected or not, tolerated or not, what function these bodies serve in our cities–all that is complicated in pretty interesting ways by the homeless hotspots thing. it is relatively easy, i think, to acknowledge abstractly that we are complicit in their poverty by our participation in the economy, but their actual bodies are also a product of our politics. how homeless people smell (and hence how close we want to stand to them), for example, is a direct product of how accessible bathrooms are in the city. how sick they are (and hence how safe we feel in touching them) is a product of their access to services. so the hotspots thing is repulsive because it is gross to think we are literally just using people like lampposts, but it is also literally repulsive because we have to approach bodies that we normally give wide berth. i don’t really know or care if that’s what the people who thought this up had in mind but at least this stunt has us thinking about homeless people for a minute and that isn’t the worst thing.* anyway i think there’s something interesting to be written here about all this, and maybe even about how this relates to the issues you raise. but probably not by me if it is going to be any good.

*perhaps inconsistently i don’t feel the same way at all about kony–i just thought that was fucking terrible