There’d always been homeless people in Los Angeles, but the first decade of the Twenty-First Century AD hosted two events which pushed the situation into overdrive.
The first event was when nineteen Muslims attacked the United States with airplanes on September 11th, 2001 AD.
This provided the pretext for a series of unending wars in the Middle East.
Lots of Americans, like the former Adam Leroux, went over to foreign countries and killed a huge number of Muslims, and had the process fuck up their heads and bodies.
And unlike depictions of PTSD in cultural products made by Hollywood professionals, the consequences of this damage were more severe than flashback montages after someone mistook a traffic sign for a Shi’ite.
The other event was in 2007/8 AD, when predatory banking practices had collapsed the economy and obliterated the homes and wealth of a disproportionate number of African-American and Latino peoples.
So there were a bunch of former soldiers, who’d been given a glimpse of humanity at its worst, and as a result had been rendered unfit for society.
And there were a bunch of people without any money or homes.
And don’t forget: the weather in Los Angeles was tolerable in every month of the year, which was untrue of almost every other place in the country.
And also don’t forget: the Twentieth Century AD was about the ruthless exploitation of peoples’ natural weaknesses for mind-altering chemicals, and this exploitation had been legitimized by every rung of society.
Despite best efforts by the money laundering of the international capitalist class, the neighborhood of Skid Row had not changed that much, and because the Jaguar XJ-S was on 6th Street, the women of Fairy Land had a perfect view.
The streets were lined with canvas tents and human bodies.
There were about fifty tents on each side of every block.
The women passed SROs, which were single-room-occupancy hotels that catered to the homeless. The women passed missions, which were Christian charities that attempted to feed and clothe the homeless. The women passed the Skid Row building of the Los Angeles Police Department, which was a state-funded apparatus that, amongst other tasks, kicked the shit out of homeless people.
What none of this conveys, really, is the squalor.
And, hey, it’s mildly fucked up to write about the most destitute people in the country and say that they were living in filth.
It’s not as if they don’t know.
But at the same time, it’s a fact.
The filth was off the charts.
There was trash and piss and shit and it was everywhere and it had been there for so long that it had changed the color of the sidewalks and the streets.
There’s a way that you, reader, can measure the ways in which the American government had failed its most vulnerable citizens.
Google!
Google was a company that’d made more money off advertisements than any other company in the history of the world, but it had been founded by people who were embarrassed by a business model dependent upon advertising lawn chairs, car insurance, and Viagra.
To deflect the embarrassment, the company cloaked itself in an aura of innovation and some old bullshit about the expansion of human knowledge.
Google maintained this façade by providing web and mobile services to the masses.
The most beloved of these services was the near daily alteration of the company’s logo as it appeared on the company’s website.
Almost every day, the Google logo transformed into cutesy, diminutive cartoons of people who’d done something with their lives other than sell advertisements.
These cartoons were called Google Doodles.
They encompassed the whole spectrum of achievement, with a special focus on scientific achievement and the lives of minorities. In its own way, this was a perfect distillation of politics in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Whenever they appeared, the Google Doodles were beloved and celebrated in meaningless little articles on meaningless little websites.
They were not met with the obvious emotion, which would be total fucking outrage at a massive multinational corporation co-opting a wide range of human experience into an advertisement for that very same corporation.
Here was the perversity of Twenty-First-Century AD life: Native-American women had a statistically better chance of being caricatured in a Google Doodle than they did of being hired into a leadership position at Google.
And no one cared.
People were delighted!
They were being honored!
By a corporation!
But look, reader, before you assume your bien-pensant righteousness about the tech industry, let me point out that it’s not as if publishing is any better.
Of the New Yorker’s forty-seven issues published in the Year of the Froward Worm, ten featured a cutesy illustration of a Black woman on the cover.
By my count, and this may be low because it’s impossible to verify everyone’s identity, the New Yorker published fourteen pieces by Black women.
If you assume an average contributor count of thirteen people per issue, then that’s 611 contributors across the year, which comes out to exactly 2.29 per cent of the magazine’s 2017 AD contributions being authored by Black women.
And ten out of forty-seven is 21.28 per cent.
Anyway.
In 2007 AD, Google introduced Google Street View.
Google Street View was a massive invasion of privacy.
It worked like this: Google bought cameras that could take a full 360-degree image.
Google strapped these cameras atop cars, and then hired people to drive these cars around America, while the camera took photographs every five feet. Then, using GPS geolocation, Google matched the images taken by the cameras to virtual locations on Google Maps.
You could put an address into Google Maps and see that location’s real-world appearance at the exact moment when Google committed a privacy violation.
In 2014 AD, a timeline feature was introduced, which allowed the user to view the full history of Google’s privacy violations.
In some places, this didn’t mean anything, because Google had only sent a car out once.
In major cities, like Los Angeles, you could use the Street View timeline to look at a dense archive of imagery.
Reader, here is a game that you can play.
Go to Google Maps and search for “5th Street & Crocker Los Angeles.”
Go to Street View.
Google will display its most recent invasion of privacy.
If you’re savvy, you’ll be able to figure out how to use the timeline.
If you aren’t, ask a friend.
Go to the earliest image on the timeline, which should be from 2007 AD.
What you will see is an intersection in Skid Row.
While not in the best shape, it is not overrun with human misery.
Now move forward through the timeline.
Watch as the years pass by and watch as the human misery accumulates. Watch as the tents rise up. Watch as the suffering mounts. Watch as the bullshit con of America fails its most vulnerable citizens. Watch as liberal democracy dies.
And, yes, reader, it is sad.
And, yes, it is a shame.
But here we are.
You and me.
Or as they say in Turkish: sen ve ben bebek.
And we’re still doing nothing.
Worse than HRH!
But doing nothing is better than Google, a corporation which has decided that, facing a social cataclysm, the appropriate course of action is to violate the privacy of the homeless and then post the evidence on the Internet.
The ropey smartphone navigation directed Rose Byrne to turn left from 6th onto Stanford Avenue.