Silicon Valley Is Now Using AI to Root Out Homeless People 😭

The rich will do anything except address the root cause

Jared A. Brock

Mar 26, 2024

What is the ultimate cause of homelessness?

Is it laziness?

Mental illness?

Drug addiction?

Poverty?

Is it greedy for-profit land-lorders financializing human shelter and hoarding houses in order to maximize rent prices to extract profits?

It’s all of these things (especially the last one), but at the end of the day, the #1 root cause of homelessness is far more primitive than most people imagine:

The root cause of homelessness is landlessness.

And the root cause of landlessness is the privatization of land.

Think about it for a second:

If all land was common — if property “rights” didn’t exist — and you desperately needed somewhere to live, you could just walk until you found an empty space and then just use the wood and rocks on said space to build shelter and grow food.

There’s no such thing as landlessness when land is common.

No First Nation native American worried about dying as a beggar on the streets.

Enter private property “rights.”

In truth, private property rights are just the monopolization of that which no human actually has the moral right to own, nor the physical ability to do so.

If land monopolization was illegal, Bill Gates, a sickly quasi-vegetarian centa-billionaire who currently hoards more farmland than anyone in the nation (nearly 300,000 acres), couldn’t personally defend one acre, let alone an area the size of eighteen Manhattan islands.

People say there’s a housing crisis and they’re right — Bill Gates personally hoards enough land to house 30 million people.

Homelessness ultimately exists because of corruption:

Because of the corruption of land monopolization
Because of the corruption of for-profit land-lording/shelter-hoarding
Because of the corruption of compounding bankster interest, which massively jacks the price of ownership and rentership
Because of the corruption of money, which ensures prices continually rise faster than wages

It’s extremely controversial to even say so, but the reality is that homelessness will continue to compound at the same rate that economic exploitation compounds.

It’s just math.

Okay, now let’s talk about the wretched city of San Jose.

We’ve established that landlessness is, at its core, a product of pure unadulterated corruption.

Landlessness is an engineered crisis of epic proportions, caused by the evil of greedy people.

The solution to landlessness is obvious to thinking people: Ensure every homo sapien born on planet Earth receives enough physical resources to survive. What that looks like could vary:

It could mean giving everyone a few free acres to steward. (This is what the Bible suggests we should do.) If that means our billionaire buddy Billy Gates has a bunch of his excess acres taxed away, so be it — they weren’t even his to begin with.
It could mean taxing the value of all land (called Georgism) and sending a monthly citizen’s dividend so people can afford the things that common land would’ve provided them for free (shelter, food, water, heat, etc.)

That’s the fair, just, moral, and righteous thing to do.

So naturally, humans did the exact opposite.

In Missouri, it’s illegal to sleep on state “property”
In Los Angeles, it’s illegal to sleep within 500 feet of schools and daycares
In Venice, California, it’s illegal to live in an RV
In Chicago, they cleared out winterized tents
Some cities have put restrictions on sharing food with landless people in public spaces
Dozens of cities have made it illegal to sleep in your car on public property
Dozens of cities have made it illegal to sit or lie down on public sidewalks
Hundreds of cities have banned begging

Now, Silicon Valley is weaponizing artificial intelligence to take poor people’s misery to a whole new level.

San Jose

Do I even need to mention that San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, has some of the least affordable housing in the country?

(To afford the average one-bedroom apartment, a renter needs to make $96,000/year.)

Naturally, homelessness rates are soaring — just like everywhere else in the world where for-profit land-lorders are pushing for maximum rents.

Instead of dealing with the root cause of landlessness, the city used taxpayer dollars to hire tech companies to put cameras on a car and drive around town surveilling the population without their permission.

The goal was to use algorithms to detect “unwanted objects.”

Do you fathom how insanely evil and dangerous this mentality is?

One of San Jose’s unwanted objects is, sadly… poor people.

Silicon Valley just automated the surveillance of landless human beings.

The tech companies involved are Ash Sensors, Sensen.AI, Xloop Digital, Blue Dome Technologies, and CityRover. Of course, citizens never gave permission to be surveilled and have their data handed over to for-profit corporations. They weren’t even consulted.

Don’t worry, it gets way worse.

Here’s what a city employee said in an email a few months ago:

“If the City were to productionize this technology, we envision the cameras to be on our fleet motor pool vehicles that regularly drive throughout city limits.”

So, that’s the new future Silicon Valley has in mind for us, friends.

Roving AI robots patrolling the streets in search of “deplorables.”

(They’ll sell it to the masses by saying the focus is lost pets, overgrown trees, building structural integrity, and litter/trash, but the real money-maker will be traffic/parking tickets and fining landless people.)

One of the tech bros said his company is training algorithms to detect signs of :

“Are the windows covered inside the vehicle? Are there towels to provide privacy? Is there trash outside the vehicle, suggesting they’re using food…”

They’ve already achieved a 70% detection rate for lived-in RVs.

As if living not-outdoors is a bad thing. (Notice landlessness in any form is considered a crime.)

The rich want to get rid of the poor, full stop.

Banning homelessness

Rich elites (and low-IQ far-right-wingers) regularly push to make homelessness illegal.

But think about the utter logical stupidity of the ban-homelessness mindset:

Where, exactly, are people who don’t own land supposed to stand if all the land has been monopolized?

How, exactly, are people who don’t own land supposed to shelter and feed and clothe and warm themselves when all land has been monopolized?

Banning homelessness defies physics.

To stay alive, landless people only have one choice:

Rent their bodies to a corporation.

The corporation then turns a profit off their time, talent, energy, and creativity, paying them as little as they can possibly get away with.

Because they still don’t possess debt-free land, that worker’s money must then be given back to corporations in the form of wildly overpaying for the resources (shelter, food, heat, water, etc) that nature originally gave them for free.

It is vital to rich elites that the masses remain landless — if people owned their own source of shelter, water, heat, and food debt-free, they wouldn’t a.) let others exploit their labor for profit, and b.) overpay for corporate-produced products.

In other words: Landlessness isn’t an unfortunate bug in our economic system — it’s the essential feature.

Humanizing homelessness

Think of the person you love most in the entire world.

Your spouse. Your mom or dad. Your sibling. Your child.

Really picture them in your mind’s eye. Generate as much love and emotion and feeling as you can.

Now picture a digital dollar in a digital bank account.

Which is more important?

Every single person who is sleeping on the streets, or in a homeless shelter, or in their car, or crashing a couch, or renting from a slumlord, or shivering in a rotting RV or trailer… they are someone’s child. They are no less valuable than your loved ones.

And they are suffering and dying by the millions so the richest people in human history can get a few dollars richer.

Remember: What starts in Silicon Valley soon infects the planet.

Think: Airbnb, Uber, Facebook.

San Jose has already started a “national coalition” of more than 150 city agencies to unleash AI on the nation’s streets.

It’s the rich versus the poor, and God help us if righteous people don’t stand up and demand land for all before all of us have nowhere to stand.

🛡 Surviving Tomorrow

Silicon Valley Is Now Using AI to Root Out Homeless People 😭

The rich will do anything except address the root cause

San Jose

Banning homelessness

Humanizing homelessness

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