I chuckled, and would be well up for a small scale demonstration, but I think this will fail for two reasons:
1) I'm not confident most of the 'bad' homeless have the agency or foresight to move to Wirehead city, so it may require some dubious "encouragement".
2) The inevitable absolute anarchy/disgust/etc that would occur in the camp would, even if no worse than the same distributed across the country (even if materially less!) just be too much for the populace to bear (but maybe the nature of these people would reduce public sympathy; I'm less confident in this one.
You're thinking it would be Slaneshi heaven, when it'd actually be Nurgle hell. Junkies stay in groups of maybe hundreds at most. I think it's usually in the dozens, though. The rest of the people that surround them are the annoyed normies of the city. So in the status quo, they get herd immunity. 1.5 million immunocompromised, weak junkies in one place? That seems like it'd be a breeding ground for plagues, that would regularly decimate the population. If weed and cigs are free, we'd also probably get a lot of air pollution on top of that?
Can that be avoided?
Maybe section the city off into smaller camps, with a half a mile distance between any two encampments. Limit the camps to say maybe 1000 people at the most. Though if you allow for freedom of movement, you'd also allow rational junkies fleeing their own zone, when a plague breaks out, which would make it spread again. Put up walls around each zone with barbed wire... no that's too much like building a Nazi concentration camp.
So let's ignore that problem for now, because I don't have a good answer.
Let's be more optimistic instead:
With food and drugs being free, your average junkie behaves probably somewhat more orderly, since they don't just need to take any hit they can get their hands on. They live with less stress and can plan their highs out a bit, make an informed choice about dosage and have guaranteed safe spaces to go to. Hell... I think it's likely that some might start preferring to stay sober for at least some hours of the day. It would help if a camp could be self-policing at least to some degree, but where do you get the culture and norms from? Well... I suppose something would emerge reasonably quickly in a 1.5 million camp, if it just appeared into existence.
But definitely don't centrally plan and then just build it.
Best to start small. Try to make a couple camps for 1000 or less junkies work. See, if they can build a culture and self-police (take the junkies from one place, maybe from one race to help with that.... hey if it works like that in prisons). Take the feedback of the more lucid/responsible/sane among them and give them what they demand, when it comes to making the space less rancid/more social. If the leaders want a basketball court or a small forum where they can do theater of have an assembly, well you can probably make something sturdy out of steel. And add a basketball budget, I guess. Try out tents, modular architecture, various latrine solutions, low-cost, rugged entertainment options so that they don't fight each other out of sheer boredom and figure out slowly what kind mix between communal, public and maybe some private seclusion spaces works.
Maybe the potheads want to cluster together. Well... then the air pollution might save you on dope, because they get high on second hand smoke. The women most likely want to have their own area. The trans and gays and such... I dunno. All stuff to figure out.
Not like we're trying to build paradise here, but it's better if it's somewhat pleasant and the degens get somewhat invested in "their" place. If they can self-organize and self-police as much as possible, that cuts down on cost. Ideally at least a minority can emerge under those condition that wants to slowly wean themselves off. Could establish a drug-free zone for people trying to quit. Maybe those places allow visits from family. Good carrot. Maybe a drug-freer zone before that, with some limits at least. Like... might as well create an incentive gradient, that rewards increasing levels of orderliness/sobriety getting you more comfortable amenities/books or whatever. Also less shitty people and slightly more autonomy. Some people might enjoy some level of work in a group whilst a preacher yells sermons at them, so something like wholedigging for Jesus might work, for those getting their life together.
An open path that can make them feel human again, but if a step is too strict for them, they're welcome to go back a couple steps to the worse degens. But don't just plan it all out again, get some reputable NGOs and/or churches and let them and the smarter junkies figure it out together on how to do onsite rehabilitation. The right mix between offering both structure and discipline, whilst minimizing stress. Having so many of them in one place and in as cooperative/peaceful frame as you could possibly get them, you might might as well try to figure out, if/how/when rehab works. Junkies are the foremost experts on junkies after all, and why waste their expertise? Without drugs to score, or food to beg for, they'll be bored out of their skull, anyway.
If you can get one place decently working, take input from the leaders, the well-liked, the redeemed, and the unhappy, the volunteers and staff etc. and then design the next place.
Man, good call on the epidemiology risk, I really wasn't thinking of that.
But on the other hand, as you point out, they'll be better fed and way less stressed, too. They don't have to steal or beg, they don't have to worry about cops, it's heavily policed so they worry much less about violence, they don't have to worry about scoring drugs.
Arguably, we'd probably be moving their individual immune status in a really positive way. But the macro environment is still probably much more prone to plagues than the status quo, as you point out.
I like your sort of "federated" model where people can sort by competence and desired community norms / cleanliness. Obviously there'll be a lot of self-sorting, just like the real Burning Man with the camps.
I'm less sure about a "sobriety" gradient. I think it's a lot more likely to be like a step change - if you leave Wirehead City, it's waaayyyy easier to get clean, because you're leaving all your junkie friends behind, it's way harder to score in real cities, lots of smaller drug dealers have been put out of business in real cities, etc. So huge buffs on all the important fronts for sobriety if you leave, and non-profits can set up to specifically help / target people for doing that.
I think a sobriety gradient *within* Wirehead would be pretty hard to attain, though. These are addictive substances that are safe and free, people are def going to be hedonically maxing. And to your point about them being bored out of their skull, I think we have different mental models - in my mental model if you give a junky a small community and all the drugs they want, there's zero boredom or unrest, they're just going to be happily zoned out all day.
I agree wholeheartedly on the "start small, take community input, iterate to a working model, then grow from there" stance.
Honestly, I assume both our mental models are complete bunk from the reality of such a place/community, which has never existed and I'm not sure there are terribly good analogues. Something like Freetown Christiana, maybe. But also not really.
But scaling it up in one place might still be very hard. But if every larger urban area had a more mid-sized isolated place where where all the junkies go and stay, maybe that'd be viable.
I've been making this argument for quite a while, and fully agree. Though in my version you would actually build them 1950s-style barracks, with toilets and showers. Tents aren't sufficient for that many people, they need to go to the bathroom. And with showers you can make them bathe at least once a week. Also, being out in the middle of nowhere like that is extremely dangerous when a thunderstorm comes through, as a single big cloud to ground strike could kill hundreds.
But on the rest of your points, I fully agree. Just give them their drugs. They've already made their choice. A cot, a shower and toilet, and give them the drugs. I dont think you'd even have much chaos or violence. If they have free drugs, most of their other issues would go away and they'd mostly be zoned out and chill. I see no reason this can't happen other than people think it's crazy. It's less crazy than the status quo.
If you could target one city to convince, which would it be? The people would need to be amenable to the idea, and the results would need to be so clear as to convince others
If I were god-emperor, I'd probably go with Denver. Smaller than your big places like LA, NYC, DC, or SF, but still an appreciable problem homeless population with lots of tent cities. Culturally, they've legalized all biological drugs anyways (shrooms, weed, DMT, etc), so it's probably an easier public opinion battle than most.
And the "problem" population is pretty visible and does a lot of property crime. When I was living there in Cap Hill, my street car would get broken into ~4-5x a year, and there was a nearby street where homeless people would routinely break windows on all 30+ cars street parked, and would do this like once a month on average, and the cops would just do nothing. So to be clear, they were causing like 10-$20k in damage every month or so, for the "less than pocket change" people leave in their cars, and literally nobody would do anything about it.
So I think it would be easier culturally, a smaller-but-still-relevant size, and you'd probably see some real results pretty quickly.
This would be absolutely fantastic for all the homeless who'd prefer to stay in their city; with all the craziest competition out of town it'd be so much safer to be a homeless drug addict staying right at home. Much higher success rate for begging too when people assume you aren't a drug addict. Collapsing street prices as well, due to chronic over-supply. A massive upgrade in lifestyle all round!
Maybe you could run a small version of this as a for-profit company with profits being contractually reinvested into experimentation and scaling it up for x number of years or till you hit a certain target, with the state being your first customer. Though the market for rehab/homeless housing is currently dominated by politically connected grifters, that thrive on making the problem worse. At least, that was thing in NYC, iirc. So you would need to do some politicking to get a slice of the pie. Maybe angle to get a billionaire sponsor or capital investment.
Yeah, the biggest obstacle is this requires multiple levels of involvement, and real money - city, state, and federal, with all the barriers and inefficiences of each layer.
The reason it's a world of connected grifters is because navigating that political landscape is genuinely hard.
> Maybe angle to get a billionaire sponsor or capital investment.
Yeah, dream world this idea gets in front of Elon and he uses DOGE or other federal connections to make the federal end easy, and uses existing business / political connects in Nevada to make it easy at the state level. That would wipe out the hardest two layers of problems.
If you want to invest some time and energy trying to see it get done or at least picked up, try your local EA meetup (or maybe the next three closest). Discuss the idea there. Smart, altruistic, spreadsheet-brained people there and they have or can probably help with connections.
Yep, it's a solid angle. I'd also love it if somebody who actually uses Twitter and is connected tweeted this to George Hotz, because I think he'd get a kick out of it.
In terms of EA and SSC meetups though, I retired young a few years ago and have been traveling or living overseas in countries that don't really have rat / EA scenes since then, so I'm pretty out of the loop.
I chuckled, and would be well up for a small scale demonstration, but I think this will fail for two reasons:
1) I'm not confident most of the 'bad' homeless have the agency or foresight to move to Wirehead city, so it may require some dubious "encouragement".
2) The inevitable absolute anarchy/disgust/etc that would occur in the camp would, even if no worse than the same distributed across the country (even if materially less!) just be too much for the populace to bear (but maybe the nature of these people would reduce public sympathy; I'm less confident in this one.
You're thinking it would be Slaneshi heaven, when it'd actually be Nurgle hell. Junkies stay in groups of maybe hundreds at most. I think it's usually in the dozens, though. The rest of the people that surround them are the annoyed normies of the city. So in the status quo, they get herd immunity. 1.5 million immunocompromised, weak junkies in one place? That seems like it'd be a breeding ground for plagues, that would regularly decimate the population. If weed and cigs are free, we'd also probably get a lot of air pollution on top of that?
Can that be avoided?
Maybe section the city off into smaller camps, with a half a mile distance between any two encampments. Limit the camps to say maybe 1000 people at the most. Though if you allow for freedom of movement, you'd also allow rational junkies fleeing their own zone, when a plague breaks out, which would make it spread again. Put up walls around each zone with barbed wire... no that's too much like building a Nazi concentration camp.
So let's ignore that problem for now, because I don't have a good answer.
Let's be more optimistic instead:
With food and drugs being free, your average junkie behaves probably somewhat more orderly, since they don't just need to take any hit they can get their hands on. They live with less stress and can plan their highs out a bit, make an informed choice about dosage and have guaranteed safe spaces to go to. Hell... I think it's likely that some might start preferring to stay sober for at least some hours of the day. It would help if a camp could be self-policing at least to some degree, but where do you get the culture and norms from? Well... I suppose something would emerge reasonably quickly in a 1.5 million camp, if it just appeared into existence.
But definitely don't centrally plan and then just build it.
Best to start small. Try to make a couple camps for 1000 or less junkies work. See, if they can build a culture and self-police (take the junkies from one place, maybe from one race to help with that.... hey if it works like that in prisons). Take the feedback of the more lucid/responsible/sane among them and give them what they demand, when it comes to making the space less rancid/more social. If the leaders want a basketball court or a small forum where they can do theater of have an assembly, well you can probably make something sturdy out of steel. And add a basketball budget, I guess. Try out tents, modular architecture, various latrine solutions, low-cost, rugged entertainment options so that they don't fight each other out of sheer boredom and figure out slowly what kind mix between communal, public and maybe some private seclusion spaces works.
Maybe the potheads want to cluster together. Well... then the air pollution might save you on dope, because they get high on second hand smoke. The women most likely want to have their own area. The trans and gays and such... I dunno. All stuff to figure out.
Not like we're trying to build paradise here, but it's better if it's somewhat pleasant and the degens get somewhat invested in "their" place. If they can self-organize and self-police as much as possible, that cuts down on cost. Ideally at least a minority can emerge under those condition that wants to slowly wean themselves off. Could establish a drug-free zone for people trying to quit. Maybe those places allow visits from family. Good carrot. Maybe a drug-freer zone before that, with some limits at least. Like... might as well create an incentive gradient, that rewards increasing levels of orderliness/sobriety getting you more comfortable amenities/books or whatever. Also less shitty people and slightly more autonomy. Some people might enjoy some level of work in a group whilst a preacher yells sermons at them, so something like wholedigging for Jesus might work, for those getting their life together.
An open path that can make them feel human again, but if a step is too strict for them, they're welcome to go back a couple steps to the worse degens. But don't just plan it all out again, get some reputable NGOs and/or churches and let them and the smarter junkies figure it out together on how to do onsite rehabilitation. The right mix between offering both structure and discipline, whilst minimizing stress. Having so many of them in one place and in as cooperative/peaceful frame as you could possibly get them, you might might as well try to figure out, if/how/when rehab works. Junkies are the foremost experts on junkies after all, and why waste their expertise? Without drugs to score, or food to beg for, they'll be bored out of their skull, anyway.
If you can get one place decently working, take input from the leaders, the well-liked, the redeemed, and the unhappy, the volunteers and staff etc. and then design the next place.
Man, good call on the epidemiology risk, I really wasn't thinking of that.
But on the other hand, as you point out, they'll be better fed and way less stressed, too. They don't have to steal or beg, they don't have to worry about cops, it's heavily policed so they worry much less about violence, they don't have to worry about scoring drugs.
Arguably, we'd probably be moving their individual immune status in a really positive way. But the macro environment is still probably much more prone to plagues than the status quo, as you point out.
I like your sort of "federated" model where people can sort by competence and desired community norms / cleanliness. Obviously there'll be a lot of self-sorting, just like the real Burning Man with the camps.
I'm less sure about a "sobriety" gradient. I think it's a lot more likely to be like a step change - if you leave Wirehead City, it's waaayyyy easier to get clean, because you're leaving all your junkie friends behind, it's way harder to score in real cities, lots of smaller drug dealers have been put out of business in real cities, etc. So huge buffs on all the important fronts for sobriety if you leave, and non-profits can set up to specifically help / target people for doing that.
I think a sobriety gradient *within* Wirehead would be pretty hard to attain, though. These are addictive substances that are safe and free, people are def going to be hedonically maxing. And to your point about them being bored out of their skull, I think we have different mental models - in my mental model if you give a junky a small community and all the drugs they want, there's zero boredom or unrest, they're just going to be happily zoned out all day.
I agree wholeheartedly on the "start small, take community input, iterate to a working model, then grow from there" stance.
Honestly, I assume both our mental models are complete bunk from the reality of such a place/community, which has never existed and I'm not sure there are terribly good analogues. Something like Freetown Christiana, maybe. But also not really.
But scaling it up in one place might still be very hard. But if every larger urban area had a more mid-sized isolated place where where all the junkies go and stay, maybe that'd be viable.
I've been making this argument for quite a while, and fully agree. Though in my version you would actually build them 1950s-style barracks, with toilets and showers. Tents aren't sufficient for that many people, they need to go to the bathroom. And with showers you can make them bathe at least once a week. Also, being out in the middle of nowhere like that is extremely dangerous when a thunderstorm comes through, as a single big cloud to ground strike could kill hundreds.
But on the rest of your points, I fully agree. Just give them their drugs. They've already made their choice. A cot, a shower and toilet, and give them the drugs. I dont think you'd even have much chaos or violence. If they have free drugs, most of their other issues would go away and they'd mostly be zoned out and chill. I see no reason this can't happen other than people think it's crazy. It's less crazy than the status quo.
If you could target one city to convince, which would it be? The people would need to be amenable to the idea, and the results would need to be so clear as to convince others
If I were god-emperor, I'd probably go with Denver. Smaller than your big places like LA, NYC, DC, or SF, but still an appreciable problem homeless population with lots of tent cities. Culturally, they've legalized all biological drugs anyways (shrooms, weed, DMT, etc), so it's probably an easier public opinion battle than most.
And the "problem" population is pretty visible and does a lot of property crime. When I was living there in Cap Hill, my street car would get broken into ~4-5x a year, and there was a nearby street where homeless people would routinely break windows on all 30+ cars street parked, and would do this like once a month on average, and the cops would just do nothing. So to be clear, they were causing like 10-$20k in damage every month or so, for the "less than pocket change" people leave in their cars, and literally nobody would do anything about it.
So I think it would be easier culturally, a smaller-but-still-relevant size, and you'd probably see some real results pretty quickly.
This would be absolutely fantastic for all the homeless who'd prefer to stay in their city; with all the craziest competition out of town it'd be so much safer to be a homeless drug addict staying right at home. Much higher success rate for begging too when people assume you aren't a drug addict. Collapsing street prices as well, due to chronic over-supply. A massive upgrade in lifestyle all round!
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing this with me.
Maybe you could run a small version of this as a for-profit company with profits being contractually reinvested into experimentation and scaling it up for x number of years or till you hit a certain target, with the state being your first customer. Though the market for rehab/homeless housing is currently dominated by politically connected grifters, that thrive on making the problem worse. At least, that was thing in NYC, iirc. So you would need to do some politicking to get a slice of the pie. Maybe angle to get a billionaire sponsor or capital investment.
Yeah, the biggest obstacle is this requires multiple levels of involvement, and real money - city, state, and federal, with all the barriers and inefficiences of each layer.
The reason it's a world of connected grifters is because navigating that political landscape is genuinely hard.
> Maybe angle to get a billionaire sponsor or capital investment.
Yeah, dream world this idea gets in front of Elon and he uses DOGE or other federal connections to make the federal end easy, and uses existing business / political connects in Nevada to make it easy at the state level. That would wipe out the hardest two layers of problems.
If you want to invest some time and energy trying to see it get done or at least picked up, try your local EA meetup (or maybe the next three closest). Discuss the idea there. Smart, altruistic, spreadsheet-brained people there and they have or can probably help with connections.
Yep, it's a solid angle. I'd also love it if somebody who actually uses Twitter and is connected tweeted this to George Hotz, because I think he'd get a kick out of it.
In terms of EA and SSC meetups though, I retired young a few years ago and have been traveling or living overseas in countries that don't really have rat / EA scenes since then, so I'm pretty out of the loop.
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If there is no outhouse nearby, men make one.