At the SXSW festival/conference in Austin, technology firm BBW is paying homeless people to carry wireless devices and wear shirts saying "I am a homeless hotspot," prompting an online outcry. Sam Biddle blusters:
Although this is ostensibly about giving the homeless money—BBH says they keep all the proceeds from those who pay for 4G access—it’s categorically awful, and all for the convenience of SXSW’s widely well-off patrons. But it gives the homeless jobs! Yes, as would using them as human coffee tables, or hunting them as game, or having them dance for pennies in Superman outfits at your next dinner party. Working as hotspot is worse than not working at all.
Hunting them as game? Yglesias counters the uproar:
[T]he negative reaction to this sort of thing always drives the more literal-minded of us slightly crazy.
Think about all the companies involved in one way or another in SXSW who did absolutely nothing at all for Austin's homeless population. How much condemnation did they get? None. BBH's stunt here offends our sense of human dignity, but the real offense is that people were languishing in such poor conditions that they would find this to be an attractive job offer. The sin they're being punished for is less any harm they've done to homeless people than the way they broke decorum by shoving the reality of human misery amidst material plenty into the faces of convention-goers. The polite thing to do is to let suffering take place off stage and unremarked upon.
Update from a reader:
Sadly we can't all make money writing for Gizmodo like Sam Biddle, and this is a far cry from acting as a human coffee table. It sounds to me like a crappy job an Austin high school kid on spring break might have. The problem is the "LOL, they're homeless" attitude evident in the cutesy alliterative "Homeless Hotspot" name, the t-shirts and the rest of it. Delete the loaded word 'homeless' and BBH actually is giving destitute people jobs providing a legitimate service people want. The cruelty is in the sneer, not the job itself, which is where Biddle's fulminating breaks down logically.
Another reader piles on:
Discomfort turns to outright paternalism when Sam Biddle declares that "Working as hotspot is worse than not working at all." Oh really? Why don’t we ask Clarence what he thinks of that? Oh, wait! We know what Clarence thinks – because if he thought it "worse than not working at all," he wouldn’t have taken the job.
(Screenshot of the front page of homelesshotspots.org)
The Dish 