I bet homelessness was less intense before the proliferation of IT. I've been unhoused for about 3.5 years now, last few months I do have a shelter situation an

I bet homelessness was less intense before the proliferation of IT. I've been unhoused for about 3.5 years now, last few months I do have a shelter situation and it's been much easier to gain weight and study. For my first 5 years in tech in SF I was stepping over homeless people on my way to my tech job asking why they didn't just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did in high school living with my parents. Turns out having a place to plug in a computer and a 15" monitor and a shower and clean clothes to interview in is a so-called privilege, no matter the condition of the place or quality of parenting. It's more of an externality to IT than a direct problem as I see it. People are plugged in so it's easier to step over the problems around them. We have access to growth all over the world through chat and forums, so why would we spend our precious time on people who can most likely take us nowhere better than we presently are? Being homeless on Twitter was interesting, because it's like "if you can affort a smart phone then you can afford food;" I think the pandemic has erased that stereotype, at least. Now it's like "you have Twitter, why can't you jump on Zoom?" and "if you have time to Tweet then you have time to apply to a job"--indeed, time, but perhaps not the space or bandwidth or power or editing software to run more than Twitter. This may extend to social services via small screens but I don't have much experience with that. We could extend the effect to reduction of menial and low-mid level management jobs as well, which keeps people working 2-3 entry levels jobs as they start families in their mid-20s and beyond. I'm less sure of that case as it starts to get complex. I saw a different dynamic in my service jobs recently than I did as a teenager in the late '90s, but I wasn't there long enough to dissect it in detail. I can say when I was in high school most of my co-workers were high schoolers except the odd "older" person, recently it was almost an opposite proportion with perhaps 1 high schooler on each team. More competition = less opportunity for the vulnerable/unmarketable homeless population is the connection.