America, Land of the Free Hookup
What follows is the verbal startle response of tov. X on reading the following article this morning as he bolted down a few scraps of food in what is laughingly termed "breakfast in his hovel in the sky on the 10th floor of a Senior Warehouse in Cleveland, OH USA.
Excerpt:
"Step two of my project is WeAreVisible.com, a social media literacy training site for homeless people, with, simple, step-by-step tutorials to teach beginners how to set up and use a Gmail, Facebook or Twitter account. On the website, there are testimonies of people who explain that, as a homeless person in real life, they couldn't interact with others because their homelessness created a barrier. But online, where no-one knew who they were, they were gradually able to turn a few friendly ‘tweets' into real friendships, and slowly re-connect with the rest of the world."
"Step two of my project is WeAreVisible.com, a social media literacy training site for homeless people, with, simple, step-by-step tutorials to teach beginners how to set up and use a Gmail, Facebook or Twitter account. On the website, there are testimonies of people who explain that, as a homeless person in real life, they couldn't interact with others because their homelessness created a barrier. But online, where no-one knew who they were, they were gradually able to turn a few friendly ‘tweets' into real friendships, and slowly re-connect with the rest of the world."
Perhaps it is unsurprising, in a land where a national monument-*1* famously refers to workers in other lands as "refuse," that someone in our great land regards homeless workers' freedom to engage in online social networking as more central to their condition than.. oh, I don't know... homes!
In other countries workers have class consciousness, here we have a pissing contest over which "foreigners" enjoy "freedom" of the proper American sort and how far toward our exalted state they might have risen. Americans are trained to compare themselves, in this regard, to for instance Cuba where, we are told, their sad Cuban asses have no freedom. Never mind that 85% of Cubans own their own home, that their mortgage payments are limited to 10% of combined family income and that there is no interest on their mortgage loans. The important thing to remember is that here in America we are free-- free to be homeless.
It is in this context that one can better appreciate the good works of giving the homeless freedom rather than homes.
I have listened to the voices in the videos posted by the author, and find each of them pathetic in its isolation. What is needed here is class solidarity, not the freedom to tickle the conscience of some voyeuristic bourgeois iPhone toting parasite. The folks who hold the means to repair this problem, like the Walton family that pays workers in Bangladesh less than 2 cents per hour while Wal-Mart siphons off the surplus value of their labor to fill the Walton's coffers with profit enough to elevate 3 of their number to the list of the 10 wealthiest parasites on earth, have no conscience to tickle.
What I do not hear behind these isolated voices is a mass of unemployed, homeless and destitute workers shouting, "What do we need? TWITTER! When do we need it? NOW?"
So yes, the author's project does perhaps enhance "freedom," in particular "free speech," to the degree that it is, "Giving homeless people a voice on the Web." But has that led the millions who share their condition to materially better conditions? The author now has me hearing a voice from America's past, Mathew Arnold, who was evidently not mesmerized by the favorite fetish word of modern day neoliberal capitalism, "Freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere."
*1* Thanks, and a tip of her pointy hat to France, where the Roma are now treated like refuse and shipped elsewhere.
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