Bartle Bogle Hegarty has reportedly ended the homeless-Austinites-as-mobile-WiFi-spots experiment/publicity stunt that was one of the biggest news items to emerge out of South by Southwest 2012. There was strong backlash and, on this site, a thorough consideration of how the whole thing fit into broader political-economic currents. As a former psychiatric counselor who worked with currently or previously homeless folks, I’m happy to see any public discussion of homelessness as well as some relatively safe and transparent work opportunities—at around minimum wage—available to this often ignored population. But to me that conversation seemed to emerge more from the backlash than BBH’s actual involvement with the homeless community. I’d like to pick some of these threads up, add new ones, and consider what this incident has to say about the use of information technology as a development tool and knowledge workers’ relationships to postindustrial cities. These ideas were developed in conversation with Jason Farman, who was kind enough to provide the screencaps included below.

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 that WiFi vendor Clarence points to, “They [residents] walk around and just see people, don’t talk to them. Past the homeless too. You don’t even see us.” But this new visibility trades invisibility for infrastructural non-awareness or acceptance. In DC, I can see the cell phone antennae in my neighborhood if I look hard enough, but I still don’t really care. BBH is asking us to accept homelessness as a feature of a wireless urban landscape to be navigated:

The younger, whiter, richer tech crowd of SXSW is asked to predicate their technical and professional mobility—to go where they want and do what they want, to be present in multiple on and offline spaces—on the easy availability of my country’s most stigmatized form of mobility—folks who move from clinic to shelter to subsidized housing and often back again because they lack that key feature of normative American identity, a house.

That knowledge worker mobility would depend on and, I would argue, be validated through homeless mobility is not feature unique to BBH’s homeless WiFi experiment. Indeed this is a key feature of projects deploying information and community technology for development (#ICT4D) at home and abroad—especially WiFi. A portion of Wireless Networking in the Developing World (2007) traces how an explosion of development projects in Timbuktu, Mali have actually left the city, compared to other similarly remote cities in Mali, over-saturated with wireless options because Timbuktu is, for development workers in the Global North, mythologized for its remoteness and thus a prime target to prove technical expertise and project viability. This is an expertise that is often meant to be later re-deployed in Global North contexts, as Adrian Mackenize shows with the Meraki Free the Net project, and others, that use development projects as field tests for deployments in places like San Francisco or Copenhagen. This is not to say that these developers are evil or manipulative people, but that the spectacle of ICT4D is generally connected with reuse in the developer’s urban setting. I’ve always been struck by how the ICT4D community uses ‘development’ to denote both uplift for the disadvantaged (the ‘developing countries) and the creation and refinement of information technology (the ‘development cycle’). With Meraki and BBH, innovation is tested there, with them (“Africa”, the homeless), partly because of the looser regulatory environments and social norms that exist outside the the developer’s home community. To be clear: BBH needed homelessness in order to effectively deploy their spectacle of wirelessness (Mackenzie’s term). Imagine if BBH had sent out PR interns wearing ‘I’m Stacy, a 4G hotspot’ shirts instead of residents of Front Steps (a great organization). Would not have worked. Those being developed—the homeless, mobile in a ‘bad’ way—are necessary context to prove BBH’s wireless development—technologists who can blog over tall buildings in a single bound, mobile in a ‘good’ way.

This is troubling to me. And not just because of questions of exploitation which we’ll continue to debate, and which BBH has attempted to answer with the voices of the vendors involved. It provides a technosocial coda to the story of urban spaces in Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red/Times Square Blue (Steven Shaviro has a quick review here). In the first half of this book, Delany describes—frankly, and with great human detail—the gay cruising scene in old Times Square and his involvement in it. It can be a shock the first time through, but it’s also refreshing to see the everydayness with which he describes his multiple sexual experiences at different times and places and with a variety of partners. For Delany, the Disneyfication of Times Square in the David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani eras that removed homeless people, pornography, and other non-family friendly sights and sites also removed the possibility of random, cross-class social contact and replaced it with planned moments of social contact modeled on suburbia. This has been repeated across the globe, with specific local wrinkles, and has particular consequences for those who rely on non-sanctioned, unplanned forms of social contact, especially in cities, to create supportive networks—especially the LGBT community.

I believe that BBH’s Homeless Hotspot publicity campaign captures and utilizes the anxiety of cross-class context just as white flight out of major U.S. urban centers has started to reverse, mainly with young people, and as people of color, especially those in the working classes, are being priced out of cities and pushed to the margins of those communities. I’m part of this trend, as are many technology entrepreneurs. And cities directly court this social and economic capital. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg recently concluded a multi-year courtship with several research universities interested in establishing a campus within the city centered on technology and entrepreneurship. The winner, Cornell, will build an almost $2 billion campus on Roosevelt Island. At one tech entrepreneur meet-up in DC, I saw a business development representative from the mayor’s office review tax-credits for tech start-ups and highlight the benefits of the city’s main centers of gentrification (e.g., Capitol Hill, 14^th Street NW, Columbia Heights). At a larger event, the Mayor himself, Vincent Gray, addressed the mostly white crowd and joined them for a screening of a documentary on tech start-ups. This is the same crowd that makes up SXSW Interactive and who re-developed Austin, whether at giants like IBM or nimbler start-ups like Gowalla.

Homelessness in the US is not disappearing, it is generally on the rise. As young, white entrepreneurs stream back into walkable urban communities, it’s inevitable that they’ll meet people like Clarence. What BBH seems to suggest is that the homeless should not be pushed out of the city, but mobilized as infrastructure that supports entrepreneurial, technological mobility—in the same way that abandoned warehouses are appropriated as loft housing or old chimneys are turned into cell phone towers. 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. Recalling ICT4D, it’s the classic neoliberal, everyone-wins-through-an-open-market model: the homeless are developed, that development validates the practices of the developers, who are developing products in a re-developed city. I am concerned, like many others, that these development movements will keep re-cycling without noticing and addressing the peopled, placed, and politicized ground on which they stand.