It's crazy how quickly the internet can ruin people's lives just by being outraged. My aunt worked with a lady who ended up on reddit for yelling at some kids. As my aunt tells it, the lady was a shitty person who was abusive to coworkers and the video was in-line with her usual behavior. She's unemployed now, and (according to my Aunt) still receives death-threats from people. I like seeing shitty people held accountable for their behavior, but I hate the disproportionate response of mob mentality. The internet burns them to their roots. In the situation of Frank Meza, I have to agree with this guy: https://twitter.com/realdumbrunner/status/1148021247806062592 I wish the pitchforks and the torches could stay stowed for shit like this. In any case, some of the homeless in my city have been migrating closer to my workplace, which is in the middle of what we call the "Old Market", an expensive part of town with expensive shops, expensive rent, expensive apartments, expensive restaurants... The crackdown has been frustrating to watch, and it's been done quietly. I've noticed the same guys hanging around under a bridge I park near for the last two weeks. They have sleeping bags, a tent, and a little propane stove they use to make coffee and cook breakfast. When I was parking this morning, they were gone. When I went out to lunch, four city workers were tossing their things into black garbage bags. I'm not a huge fan of them living in the middle of what can qualify as my city's "tourist" destination (lol), but they have a right to exist and I'm not going to begrudge them for their decision to set up camp close to my daily routine. I wish my city did more to help them, and I wish we didn't just throw away what could be their only fucking possessions. My city's homeless population can't hold a candle to LA's, but it was nice to read your thoughts on the camps close to you; helps me frame my own thoughts
I used to run /r/favors. We had a couple designers on there that would do cheap work so they wouldn't be homeless. A guy showed up demanding to be able to post for an entire media campaign for free and I told him no, then he told me I was being unreasonable so I told him to pound sand. I went from being "that guy who turns down commenter of the year every year" to being persona non-grata in the space of two hours. Two hours that, ironically enough, I was busy doing some pro-bono design work at a church in Compton. I wish I could say that it was all worth it but once the work was done I went to a service and despite all the lovely ladies in their lovely hats, it was an hour's worth of fire and brimstone and eternal damnation for the sodomites of the world. It's super-hard not taking it personally. I think the people who get through that sort of shit okay develop an understanding that it isn't about them, it's about the mob's constant need to spew hatred and vitriol at something 24-7 and that it's their time. What pisses me off is that anybody with a soul can tell that any upvote/downvote system, any content curator built around "engagement" is an extremism engine. When you're making it easier for people to share the stuff they feel strongly, you're making hatred much more fluid than mild approval. You're building a system designed to burn out of control at the slightest cinder. Unfortunately the lot of them - from Ohanian to Zuckerberg to Dorsey - are stone cold sociopaths. They give no fucks. It's numbers to them, not people and they don't see tears on their statistics to wipe away. Seattle does tent cities. They move. Churches or cities or green spaces will agree to host a tent city for 8-12 weeks and for those two to three months, there's a community of largely harmless homeless. They're the ones that don't go nuts without their medication, they're the ones that don't steal for a living. The high-functioning ones. They don't stick around long enough for the neighbors to get up-in-arms, and they don't let just anybody hang out; it's an attempt to deal with a lack of shelter in as humanitarian a way as possible. It's the least bad solution I've seen but it's a long way from acceptable. Los Angeles waits for encampments to accrete and then sweeps them away with garbage trucks and armed cops. It's like scraping barnacles off a barge. It's crazy how quickly the internet can ruin people's lives just by being outraged. My aunt worked with a lady who ended up on reddit for yelling at some kids.