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> If a person is not present enough to maintain perhaps the most basic condition of livability — don’t shit where you eat — it is unreasonable to expect them to do anything else at all, either for themselves, or for others.
> Like a balding man choosing a combover to a decent haircut, the American response to homelessness is rooted in denial of the very possibility of true slums in this greatest of nations.
> The across-the-board denialism results in a perverse search for pathologizing diagnoses and interventions that are framed in terms of blight and disease that must be aggressively stamped out, regardless of the human cost.
> In America, it is politically easier to let humans suffer dehumanizing degradation, than to let them reach for economic and social agency in ways that don’t conform to the aesthetics and optics of middle-class respectability.
> Growing up in India, strangely enough, I was used to seeing more homelessness in less degraded conditions. ... Not much is done by anybody to help, but there is also not much by way of perverse interventionism that prevents the homeless from helping themselves.
> In what ways are we, perhaps, “not there,” despite being physically present within a trail of garbage leading from some equivalent of an overturned trash can to a mess of stuff that pass for “possessions?
> As a more complex example, to be jobless in a milieu that expects you to be employed is like being homeless in some ways. People interact awkwardly with you, and tiptoe around your sensitivities in particular conversations.
> in milieus where having a job is not a necessity for everybody, such as [housewife] it is possible to be “unemployed” but not have to suffer any associated metaphoric homelessness. There is a way for you to be present, visible, and seen, even when the [convo] turns to jobs.
> ... as psychologically debilitating as literal homelessness — online homelessness. Even a quick glance at any notoriously sad place online, such as the YouTube comments section, will reveal the existence of an entire invisible online world that is comparable to homelessness.
> A new platform or medium comes along. You make a first-pass judgment about whether to even join it, based largely on whether you think you can cohere an inhabitable persona on it, and whether you have the time to participate on it.
> If you decide to give it a shot, you go on, you try a few experimental personas on for size, and as one starts to gel, you become present on the platform. There is now something it is like to be you on Platform X.
> You register, you claim your preferred handle or make up a less preferred one, you make up a display name reflecting whatever nymity you’ve decided to adopt, among those the platform supports. Then you begin your participation, and start to develop an identifiable stylepic.twitter.com/IoKkmXMaUE
> There are some really small accounts that present as really well-integrated and at-home personas, and some really big accounts that appear [homeless]. Accounts that arouse varying degrees of disgust reactions and cause you to metaphorically cross the street rather than engage.pic.twitter.com/iqShtbOWiy
> They are Very Online, liking, retweeting, beefing, trolling, and reply-guying. But their profiles are incoherent. Their tweet streams reveal a sort of frustrated search for an “at home” presence that seems to forever elude them.
> Their reply conversations have a quality of tentative, inept, entryist behavior being managed from a wrong sort of adjacent identity to the one they are trying to cohere. There are clear patterns of avoidance around them. Often, they appear to be talking to themselves.
> Yet they persist, trying to come alive. Some are so borderline not-human, at-home people have to do a double take or even run tests to check whether they are talking to Russian bot accounts or real people.
> What Twitter reveals is that being at home is largely about seeing and being seen in ways that allow an inhabitable identity gestalt to emerge for you. There should be something it is like to “be on Twitter,” a consciousness you can inhabit.
> As YouTube comments section reveal, it is far too fragmented a space for healthy people to meaningfully inhabit in any persistent way. If you literally try to make an online home on YouTube, there is something wrong with you.
> On YouTube, there are no clear ways to form communities, develop neighborly relationships and friendships, and so on. Sociologically, it is like a business district in a bad part of town.
> As a result, the YouTube audience is largely a digitally homeless one. Lonely, disconnected, and vulnerable to being drawn into ridiculously psychotic bunny trails that can swallow susceptible psyches whole, and spit them out utterly distorted at the other end.
> None of us is all there, all the time. A post-digital at-home consciousness is one that is yet to truly emerge. In some way, it feels like we’ve all always been homeless on this planet we call home, because we don’t really know what it truly means to be at home
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