At this year’s South by Southwest Conference, BBH Labs is playing homeless people in the city to carry wireless devices to serve as “homeless hotspots.”  The blogosphere is having a tete-a-tete about whether this is patently offensive or a poorly designed effort to help the poor.  Tim Fernholz notes that the program at least forces (Austinites?) to talk with the homeless.

Fair enough, I suppose.  But at first glance, the juxtaposition of glimmering technology and human frailty bothers me.  In “The Net Delusion,” Yvegny Morozov does a wonderful job of rebuffing the triumphalist rhetoric about the Internet “changing everything.”  In his view, journalists waxed poetic about Twitter’s role in Iran because it fit a comforting narrative about those of us in the West:

Iran’s Twitter Revolution revealed the intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor, a world where technology could be harvested to spread democracy around the globe rather than entrench existing autocracies. The irrational exuberance that marked the Western interpretation of what was happening in Iran suggests that the green-clad youngsters tweeting in the name of freedom nicely fit into some preexisting mental schema that left little room for nuanced interpretation, let alone skepticism about the actual role the Internet played at the time.

We want very much to believe that technology is the West’s gift to the world.  That information spread freely will cure what ails the human condition.   But as Morozov rather cynically points out “power is power” regardless of the technology.  Giving homeless people these “jobs” is not democratizing or revelatory.  It comes off as a triumphalist extension of what Morozov calls an “imagined revolution,” one in which technology is the conquering hero.

Jon Mitchell calls those participating in the “homeless hotspot” program “helpless pieces of privilege-extending human infrastructure.”   A bit far maybe.  The homeless have agency and might prefer this job to no job at all.  But the optics of this program brings into contrast the chasm between technology and what it’s utopian adherents promise.  In some ways, it makes clearer the limits of what technology and those who profit from it can, or more to the point, are willing to do to really be democratizing and emancipating.