On the social-media news site Reddit, he's known as /u/huckstah, an administrator on /r/vagabond, a subreddit with nearly 10,000 members – many of them identifying as "homeless" – who trade skills and stories. On "the road and the rails", he's Huck, and even after we speak twice by mobile phone, he tells me he'd prefer I don't print his real name. "People say, 'Well, you chose to become homeless.' But that's wrong," says Huck, who has been a hobo for upward of 11 years and started hopping trains and hitching rides at 18. Huck is one of the many homeless with a mobile device, a sight that has become increasingly common.
Increasing numbers of homeless people in America keep their mobile phones on the streets
The ubiquity of cheap phones and even cheaper data has prompted even longtime homeless to join the growing ranks of people with a mobile connection but no house. "The day I started on the road, I had a flip phone, an iPod, a TomTom GPS, an atlas, a laptop, and free wi-fi wasn't very easy to find," says a medic who's been homeless for four years and asks me to call him "Nuke". He now lives out of a Ford pickup truck and says: "I have a smartphone, a laptop, and free wi-fi is everywhere."
The rise of the mobile internet has made a homeless person's life easier, Nuke says. But when I ask Huck about how he and fellow travellers use their smartphones, I get the sense that even for the digitally connected homeless, staying connected is far from easy. "I keep my phone off a lot, or in airplane mode," he says, "because we can only charge up for a short time – maybe once a day, or sometimes it will be two to three days between charges, maybe an hour of charge." For Huck and his fellow itinerants, smartphone usage is measured in instants. "We check Google Maps and then we turn it off, or we make a quick phone call and then we turn it off."
That's a pity, because a smartphone can be even more useful for a homeless person than it is for those with a regular roof over their heads. For example, smartphones provide on-the-go weather forecasts, convenient for an everyday life but essential for a homeless one. "You have to keep an eye on the weather when you're living outside," says Mike Quain, a 22-year-old busker and percussionist. "Rain isn't nearly as fun when you don't have a dry place to go."
Job-hunting sites such as Craigslist are also required browsing for those trying to make a living with no permanent home. "For the past 100 years of this lifestyle in America, we found our jobs by following seasonal schedules and asking around for jobs at farmers markets and farming supply stores, looking at job ads in newspapers, asking door-to-door," says Huck. "I know thousands of hobos, and I don't know a single one that doesn't use Craigslist. It has completely changed how we find work.
Quain lists Google Maps, Couchsurfing.org and HitchWiki as "indispensable for vagabonds", while Nuke is still in awe of his smartphone's power. "I can fit an entire electronics store from the 1990s in my pocket now."
Google "American hobo culture" and you'll find a lot about decline: the death of the working-class itinerant, the fall of the Depression-era drifter who never stopped drifting and the end of the heroic hobo celebrated by the likes of the National Hobo Convention. Vice released a documentary in 2012 called Death of the American Hobo. Those "graybeards", Nuke will tell you, are on the way out, but that doesn't mean there's a dearth of culture in their wake. Itinerants under the age of 35, he says, are forming their own kind of hobo society, one that keeps up with technology and the times.
Where there used to be "jungles" and "hobohemias", areas where hobos could come together, now the internet is the place present-day hobos connect and build a community. Sites little known among the safely homed – DumpsterMap.com (a map of dumpsters ripe for diving), WiFiFreeSpot.com (a list of free wi-fi hotspots), On-Track-On-Line.com (railroad digital scanner frequencies) – are common resources, says Huck. "Prior to 2005, all of this was simply done by word-of-mouth."
Huck is developing a new hobo code. Read about the romance of hobo culture and you'll find tons of talk about hobo symbols: a face on the side of a barn means the building's safe to sleep in; a caduceus symbol on a doctor's door means the doctor will treat the homeless. But nowadays, that's all outdated. Huck is part of a project to revamp the code completely and make it more useful for the digitally connected hobo by creating a new set of symbols for things such as "wi-fi networks and free outlets". When I ask if I can publish any of the symbols, though, Huck balks. "The codes are for us," he says, "and if other people see it, they could have clues to our secrets, and the next thing you know, that outlet that was accessible to hobos is now locked up or completely gone."
Conventional wisdom says the internet and mobile technology keep us in our own little bubbles, isolated and insular. And while perhaps that's true for those with homes, Quain says it's the opposite for hobos. For the itinerant homeless, travelling in groups makes sense for a bevy of reasons: safety, company and economies of scale, especially when it comes to digital devices. "Lots of us travel in groups and share the expense of one phone," Quain says.
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Luckily for Quain and his ilk, the ubiquity of the internet makes finding fellow "travellers" easier than ever. The curious can head to SquatThePlanet.com and TravelersHQ.org to find vagabonds forming groups, swapping stories and arranging meetings.
While no comprehensive survey of homelessness and mobile ownership has been done in the US or the UK, small surveys provide a glimpse of how the trends have grown. A study by the University of Sydney found that 95 per cent of Australia's homeless own a mobile, while Keith McInnes of the Boston School of Public Health's study of homeless veterans in Massachusetts found that 89 per cent own at least one device. (In Australia, mobile penetration in the general population is 92 per cent; in the US, it's 90 per cent.) However, "it's hard to do truly representative studies of homeless persons," says McInnes. For example, mentally ill homeless living under bridges, or in the woods, are probably less likely to have a mobile phone and "less likely to be included in a survey, because they are hard to find".
But as McInnes points out, those who do possess a phone have a tool both for survival and for restoring their sense of humanity. While settled people are usually able to meet the wider world head-on and feel no shame, homelessness carries with it a pervasive, ugly stigma. "Having a mobile phone provides homeless persons with an outward-facing identity that can mask their homelessness," explains McInnes. "With a phone, people you call or who call you don't know you're homeless."
Some, like Huck, have taken this one step further, using their connectivity to promote their lives without a roof and walls as a source of pride. Near the end of our interview, Huck lets me know that he and several others on /r/vagabond have just been featured on an episode of Upvoted, Reddit's weekly podcast, in which they're celebrated, not stigmatised.
"I've found a way to be homeless without starving or begging or sleeping in ditches," he says. "I've become a professional vagabond, and this is the lifestyle that I love."
Fuente: www.independent.co.uk
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