My Twitter feed is alive with the sound of indignation about an ad agency at South by Southwest that is using the homeless as human 4G wireless hotspots. The idea is that you see a homeless person with a t-shirt reading “I am a 4G hotspot,” and then you pay them a small fee to get online. There is definitely something unsettling about this, but there is also something a bit off about a lot of the reactions I’ve been seeing to it. I’ll get back to that in a bit, after a detour through a familiar theme.

The blog post announcing the initiative is full of gobbledygook about “charitable innovation,” and it’s very unclear about whether this project is supposed to be a profit-making business venture, a charity project, or some utopian neoliberal combination of both. Whatever it is, there’s something undeniably creepy about it, in the way it turns people into infrastructure — e.g. “I am a hotspot” rather than “I’m running a hotspot.”

It’s also, naturally, an opportunity for people to project their anxieties about the desirability of capitalist “innovation.” But the homeless-as-hotspots plan highlights a point I’ve been trying to make about technology. Technical change comes in two forms, one that is designed to more intensely exploit labor, and one that is designed to replace labor. Which one will dominate depends, in large part, on the condition of labor itself.