{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

The first of the four novellas in Radicalized, namely, Unauthorized Bread, although packed with "techie" jailbreaking devices, which would appeal to hacker-culture and even Open Source enthusiasts, was more about the 2 Amerikas.  The protagonist is an Arabic [woman] refugee entering the United States where she ends up in a subsidy apartment.   The author drives home the brute facts of how "the poor" are harassed (by landlords) with 10,000 rules, subjected to inspections, and used by the corporations who grant lodgings to the poor only to receive some kind of financial gain (at the expense of the poor the corporate state claims to be "helping").

So, it is less about "hard computer science fiction," and more about being broke [$ 0.00] in Amerika.

I think the author is from Canada - not sure if French Canadian or English Canadian ...

What I got from it is an appreciation for having become familiar with programming.  It is never a waste of time to learn.  One never knows when such knowledge/skills/experience will come in handy.   

I also get how those who "sell out" to the corporate state for a career (read: gainful employment) in working against The People are actually the real "low-lifes," no matter how pretty their clothes, shiny their teeth, or fancy their cars.

The Psychological Operations against me are galvanized into action this morning (in my strange orbit, here in Dirty Jersey - couch surfing * the homelessness tsunami).   

I want to leave a quick link to a conference:  Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film and Culture
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* footnote: Proposed Method for Estimating Local Population of Precariously Housed

Couch Surfing the Waves of American Poverty

If the couch surfer is staying in someone else’s subsidized housing unit (as is often the case, because poor people tend to shelter with people from their own social networks) that is likely to draw intense bureaucratic scrutiny.

The HUD’s numbers refer only to people who stay in an official shelter, or no shelter all. The total would be far higher if the HUD included people who fall under the Urban Dictionary’s definition of a couch surfer, which refers to anyone “who is homeless and finds various couches to sleep on and homes to survive in until they are put out.” It is both concerning and darkly amusing that an extensive, supposedly definitive government report provides less context than an anonymous quip posted to illustrate vernacular speech.

I am an eyewitness to the government’s failure to take the poverty crisis in good faith.
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Couch surfing: the dangerous undercurrents


His worst experience was three months spent paying $150 a week for a dirty mattress on a lounge-room floor, surrounded by cat and dog feces.

“You can kind of get trapped in that sort of situation, because you have nowhere else to go,” he says.

Ron believes the long waiting lists for subsidized housing – gaining private rental with no references or bond money is almost impossible – means that many [young?] people experiencing homelessness are forced into couch-surfing, and often for much longer than they had originally envisioned.

In many cases this leads to depression, anxiety, loss of identity, and conflict with those who own or officially rent the house.

“More sinister impacts, including unwanted sexual advances, sexual molestation, violence, pressure to basically act as a servant, or even ‘run’ drugs, can also be a reality,” Ron says.

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Not everyone has the wherewithal to live in a tent or sleep in a shed, and obtaining SSID and a housing subsidy is a little like hitting the lottery. But anyone can couch-surf, and it is a critical practice among those who are stuck in the clogged pipeline for federal housing subsidies.

And yet!  [see above about DANGEROUS UNDERCURRENTS]
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Phil Wilson continues :

When I first met my client Rhonda, a Black woman in her 30s, at her apartment in downtown Turners Falls, she pointed to the shirtless man snoring on her living room couch and told me, “That is my gas money.”

As Rhonda explained, “Don’t anybody drive around here but me, and they all got to see the doctor, all got to eat, all got to go here and go there, and that’s on me. Do any of them give me a nickel for gas?” Rhonda received $750 a month from SSDI and another $75 apiece for her two boys, aged nine and 11. She drove her sister and her sister’s four children to appointments, as well as her aged mother who was living alone but showing signs of early dementia. Couch surfing is a way for people like Rhonda to squeeze a few dollars out of an underground economy that makes a life of poverty nominally viable. People with a housing subsidy can “sublet” a corner of their apartment to those who are even less fortunate, and Rhonda collected about $60 a week from this man. She was participating in an informal system that extends the meager generosity of the state’s so-called safety net to encompass those who are arbitrarily excluded from protection. Poverty hurts many people, and destroys others, but no one should assume that poor people passively succumb to brutal economic systems. People invent, improvise, and find ways to circumvent a bureaucratic structure that looms over life with nihilistic indifference.

However, the couch-surfing system is a very unstable one, and Rhonda soon ran into bad luck. The shirtless man on her couch, who she had met at the laundromat, apparently had a record for domestic violence. The perfect storm came down hard. A neighbor had some “beef” with Rhonda and reported the visitor to the property manager, who called Rhonda’s DSS caseworker. In such contexts, agencies and officials are like pinball flippers operated by a blindfolded player. People file complaints against one another for child neglect all the time. In most cases, these accusations result from nothing more than private animosities. The consequences for the accused, though, can be dire.