Thanks to conspiracy theorists we can't even have good things. An innocent idea (design cities to have most daily necessities in a reasonable radius) becomes a conspiracy to trap us all
I was in a class on geoengineering that had it's last in person session as the coronavirus was closing in on our campus and I was saying that the coronavirus was a fire drill for global governance and would be a test of our ability to react to bigger problems like climate change.
What I found remarkable back then was that governments were taking very strong measures against the coronavirus and not getting a lot of resistance from the population unlike the situation with global warming where an elaborate system had been built up over 40 years to prevent action.
Conspiracy theories and populist resistance took a little while to develop and certain people are in an inflamed state where something like 15 minute cities or efforts to replace gas stoves will now see an intense counterattack within two weeks or less, making our situation for global governance a lot worse than it was in 2020.
more salient than ever and making it quite critical that governments make legitimacy an important goal, maybe even creating a "department of legitimacy" which could quite directly pay dividends.
It is hard for me to say what drives the loss of (perceived) legitimacy in experts and authorities. As you rightly said, given the global problems we are facing we urgently need more of it. It is just depressing sometimes
"department of legitimacy" sounds like the most dystopian BS I have ever heard of. I always thought legitimacy in democracy came through the support of the people which is gained through serving them and their interests. This new form of "democracy" where the elites have all the answers and knows what is best for everyone is the newest form of authoritarianism, IMO.
There is no Legitimation Crisis. That phenomenon is a result of society healing itself from the scourge of all authoritarians.
> "Die Lösung" ("The Solution") is a famous satirical German poem by Bertolt Brecht about the East German uprising of 1953. Written in mid-1953, it is critical of the government and was not published at the time. It was first published in 1959 in the West German newspaper Die Welt."[1]
On one hand you could make the case that popular votes can't change the laws of physics and the limitations of biology and pretending otherwise is a matter of looking into your children's eyes and thinking about them looking into their children's eyes and, given the ever-increasing stakes, some generation soon is going to die unburied.
However, there are many good reasons why the "just trust the experts" answer is not tenable not least the self-serving behavior of experts that is proven, the uncertainty in expert judgement that is inevitable, and the sense that you can get much better conformance from people for a decision that they felt they had input into.
Habermas makes it clear there is no easy way to square that circle.
I always thought legitimacy in democracy came
through the support of the people which is gained
through serving them and their interests
I mean, yes, but....
This new form of "democracy" where the elites
have all the answers and knows what is best for
everyone is the newest form of authoritarianism,
IMO.
Even a highly educated citizen has about, what, 0.0001% of the specialized domain knowledge required to make the tactical and strategic decisions that go into running a large city, let alone a country.
Do you want things like dams, roads, a functional air traffic control system, etc? Do you, personally, know how to do all of those things? Do you think the majority of your fellow citizens do?
If you feel that your particular government does a bad job of listening to citizens and empowering experts to actually do the things then hey: that is a 100% valid complaint. But we take it a step too far when we decide that the problem is the very concept of listening to and empowering people who actually know what they are doing.
One could make the case that the problem of the day (Habermas does) is that we don't know how to make a political system which is democratic enough to be successful as well as competent enough to be successful.
Habermas was starting to write this at the time the club of Rome was writing Limits to Growth. As much as people thought Limits to Growth was about the 1970s in the 1970s, Limits to Growth predicted things were likely to go to hell between 2020-2050, maybe 2070 if we maximized our coping strategies.
I'm going to check that out. It certainly seems like he identified the heck out of our problem. Possibly our biggest problem in a sense, since it affects so many other things (our response to climate change, etc)
As much as people thought Limits to Growth was about
the 1970s in the 1970s, Limits to Growth predicted
things were likely to go to hell between 2020-2050,
maybe 2070 if we maximized our coping strategies.
I'll be interested to why he feels this is the particular half century where it all goes to hell.
It's not as if the problem of "technocrats vs. the will of the people" is exactly a new tension. When is the last time that a single common person could really understand everything required for society-level decision making? Back in days when we lived in small packs of hunter-gatherers, and pretty much everybody in the cave could use a spear and knew which berries were okay to eat?
which is not by Habermas but came out around a year before Legitimation Crisis and you’d better believe the “Club of Rome” that signed off on that book was circled by all sorts of allegations.
Those guys ran a computer model of coupled differential calculations the simulated a race between technology and population being able to make problems vs solve problems and in various scenarios resource depletion, pollution and insufficient food production eventually result in a system crash. Insofar as something is predicted to occur in a certain time that is an outcome of the model which is: (a) very sample, but (b) run many different times with different parameters (e.g. if you double the supply of natural resources the crisis breaks later but the fundamental picture doesn’t change.)
The thing was people were really inclined to think the world was going to hell in the 1970s, see
and many people who heard about Limits to Growth probably thought it was predicting an imminent crash and not something their great grandchildren would be living through.
How dare Fox entertainment pundits make people think gas stoves are going to be confiscated out of their homes imminently, when the discussion is about considering preventing installation in new builds due to health hazards.
Go play with some lead paint and stick it to the libs.
Fox was telling people "the government is coming for YOUR oven" as if people would have to get rid of their existing ovens.
I support banning or restricting or discouraging the use of indoor appliances that cause documented health issues to any user. I don't support lead paint or leaded gasoline or smoking near gas pumps. The tyranny.
And sensationalist headline aside, it's very factual about actual policies (either proposed or being implemented) that will make gas stoves more expensive to purchase and operate. Nowhere does the article claim that the government is planning on busting into houses to take away existing stoves.
Edit 2: I have to wonder, if a Republican politician was proposing a ban on the sale of new hybrids, and a leftwing outlet wrote an article with the title "The GOP is coming for your Prius" would you take as much offense at it? The headlines about gas stoves that I've seen don't seem much different than, say, a lot of the headlines I saw from the left about abortion after Row v. Wade was overturned.
People have literally been prevented from getting murdered just because their mom wanted to keep making Powerpoints for $60k a year because of that overturn.
Maybe you're right. The point is, phasing gas stoves out isn't totalitarian. You've dodged the reference to lead paint several times. Seems you don't want to acknowledge the government has a place in regulating harmful things at scale.
That keyboard you type on. It's been associated with carpal tunnel syndrome. Same with the mouse. And monitors have been known to cause vision issues if you're not careful.
IMO Global Governance failed in 2020 not because of populist resistance and conspiracy theories but because the people in charge didn't practice what they preached. It didn't help that some governments took the opportunity to "not let a crisis go to waste" and push through unpopular or controversial policy.
> I was saying that the coronavirus was a fire drill for global governance and would be a test of our ability to react to bigger problems like climate change.
This is an interesting analogy. You talk about conspiracy theories and populist resistance (which were and are rampant) but let's not pretend that the "fire fighters" weren't at times sitting inside the very building that's ostensibly on fire drinking fine wine tea and eating fois gras. There were countless examples of the ruling class making exceptions to lockdowns / covid policy for their friends and political causes-du-jour while being outright draconian in restrictions to activities and groups that did not fall in line.
The most obvious example in the US being the riots in 2020 surrounding BLM and the George Floyd killing vs people not being allowed to go to church services. Certainly, the zeitgeist from the media and ruling class would lead you to believe one was righteous and good while the other was "literally killing people".
Alternatively, if you don't want a "culture war" example: small businesses were forced to shut their doors while big box retailers were allowed to remain open under the guise of being "essential businesses". How many of the small hardware stores survived COVID vs Lowes and Home Depot, both of which made record profits?
Or, a more personal example: A very close relative of mine passed during COVID yet we were not allowed to have a funeral for her. We followed all the prescribed precautions - vaccine, masking, social distancing, testing...all of it. When a high-ranking politician (John Lewis) passed, not only was his family allowed a funeral, they managed to have three former Presidents of the United States in attendance!
I like this reply (irrespective of the culture wars aspect) and it does underscore the difficulties. If you got into that Habermas book and its sequels (had to dig them out of deep archive from my Uni library they are so dense) you'd realize the problem is deep.
A "department of legitimacy" would have to give out a lot of tough love and crack down on delegitimizing behavior, that's for sure.
As case studies I would point out: (1) a sector of Republicans who pursue one kind of legitimacy, "sticking to their guns" and posturing with extreme positions (e.g. they feel like they have at least do something to buy the perception of legitimacy of somebody) and (2) Democrats who take legitimacy for granted (I'm Hillary Clinton, of course I am legitimate). In Hillary's case there was that experience of being on the receiving end of Richard Mellon Scaife's (oddly an unnamed villain in https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...) war against her husband which convinced her that any illegitimacy perceptions were part of a "vast right wing conspiracy" thus nobody could have convinced her that she could have changed her behavior and won in 2016.
Hrmm. Habermas and Germany. That's funny, because right now there are proposals there which would criminalize to publicly/online question or doubt the 'legitimacy' of anything what their shepherds do. A widening of the already wide applicability of 'hate-spech' laws.
I used to be something of a populist (not in the "right wing Populism" sense mind), and a big believer in human potential, and thought the future could one day look something like the Star Trek: TNG world. But with every passing day, I become just a tiny hair more misanthropic and believe that all the future holds is a cyberpunk dystopia, and eventually the heat-death of the universe.
I'm hoping that I'm wrong, and that events come along and smack me in the face and show me just how wrong I am, in my lifetime. But as it stands today optimism is a hard thing to come by. And that's hard for me to say, as somebody who has spent ~50 years thinking of himself as an optimist at heart. :-(
Maybe reading Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature or something would help restore some of my optimism. Dunno.
Curious what makes you feel that way about the future? I ask because on countless objective measures, mankind is better off now than at any time in history. What am I missing?
Granted, we've got problems ecological, social, demographic, and so forth. But these don't seem to be greater than the problems we've overcome in the past.
Curious what makes you feel that way about the future?
Hopefully just "recency bias" and a weird, momentary, glitch in the development of our society! That is to say, hopefully I'm just over-reacting to something very short-term.
But to answer the question:
There are a lot of factors, and some are probably stronger signals, and some are weaker. So my sentiment right now is more about the summation of a lot of "things" that, taken collectively, seem to me to paint a dismal picture. I mean:
(this will be a very US centric list, BTW)
1. A flaming moron and wannabe authoritarian like Donald Trump being elected POTUS. And what appeared to be an associated, pronounced, increase in the overall level of hatred, jingoism, and bigotry during his term.[1]
2. That a senile, decrepit, useless POS like Joe Biden is the best we can do to replace Trump.
3. That Trump is (apparently) being taken seriously as a POTUS candidate again.
4. That Trump or Biden will very likely be the next POTUS.
5. The repeal of Roe vs. Wade
6. That on the Republican side, even though Trump may be the presumptive nominee, there does not seem to be a single member of the group of challengers who is worth a shit. Basically no high profile Republican is willing to be the "adult in the room" and both A. call out Trump for being the piece of shit he is, and B. behave like a reasonable, rational, educated, dignified adult.
7. Climate change, and the lack of progress we seem to be making in addressing it.
8. Economically, we seem pathologically incapable of rooting out corruption, regulatory capture, and cronyism. Creating the kind of Capitalism that should be just a straw-man caricature used by advocates of other ideologies. But no, we've actualized it into reality.
9. Globally, the overall rise in the appeal of authoritarian / dictatorial leaders.
10. Globally, an apparent rise in the appeal of nationalism and the associated behaviors: jingoism, hatred, bigotry, racism.
11. Decaying infrastructure: bridges collapsing, trains derailing, people being killed.
12. Our seeming inability to get a handle on excessive use of force by police.
13. Our inability to reign in "civil asset forfeiture"
14. The rise of nutty conspiracy theories and the cult like behavior of the followers of this crap (qanon, for example, but also this "15 minute city" stuff, etc)
15. Watching our technological progress all too often be used for deleterious ends, and fostering an increase in concentration of power. Facial recognition, gait analysis, etc. being used by governments to surveil their citizenry, etc.
16. Homelessness seems to be on the rise, at least locally in my area. Seems like every couple of weeks or so I see more and more people panhandling around the area, and see more tents popping up in the woods on the edge of highways.
I haven't looked up the stats nationwide, but I suspect this is a growing problem all over the US (and maybe in other places).
17. I'm sure I could go on, but what's the point. I imagine anybody reading this either gets the point or they don't (note that that's orthogonal to whether or not anyone agrees that all of these items are, in fact, reasons for despair).
[1]: Note - I'm not saying Trump is a racist or anything, or even that he intentionally inspired that kind of behavior in people. But I think the point that he somehow manages to bring out the worst in people is beyond question.
It's the fact that people are actively working to make those economic, social, demographic, etc. problems worse. Not merely resisting solutions that don't favor them, but seeking ways to make people's lives worse even without benefit to themselves.
The conspiracy theories are not merely gullible or greedy. They are actively choosing to be cruel. Gullibility can be taught; greedy can be negotiated. I have no tools for mitigating the craving for cruelty.
>> I used to be something of a populist (not in the "right wing Populism" sense mind), and a big believer in human potential, and thought the future could one day look something like the Star Trek: TNG world. But with every passing day, I become just a tiny hair more misanthropic and believe that all the future holds is a cyberpunk dystopia, and eventually the heat-death of the universe.
> Curious what makes you feel that way about the future? I ask because on countless objective measures, mankind is better off now than at any time in history.
"Objective measures" tend to by kind of myopic (e.g. a hyperbolic example: you're politically powerless and don't have healthcare but you're objectively better off because have color TV which not even kings had in the past). They're a data-driven trap that often blind over-analytical people like software engineers.
One thing that sucks more now is the greater interconnectedness of society. It's gotten to the point where local connectedness is weakening and withering, preventing people from finding security in a comfortable, agreeable community that's not constantly being buffeted from the outside. That pushes the atomized people into a fearful panic-mode, which increases mistrust and the appeal of conspiracy theories. It's a hard problem to solve because modern-day dogma says more interconnectedness = more better!
Better off is relative I guess is the point I'd raise here. Are most peoples lives easier, with overall life expectancy up, and general health as well? Yes. Are we closer to the possibility of an overnight event that could lead to the overall near extinction of the species? Well, that one's a yes too, though perhaps it could be argued that we've moved back a little since the 60s. Though, with the doomsday clock at 90 seconds right now, at least some would take the argument that we're still closer now, considering the number of players on the world stage being a bit less predictable than when it was just two major nuclear powers squaring off.
Sort of reminds me of economic cycles -- with great leverage comes great liquidity, but also, great instability.
Working on it. After spending over a decade as a volunteer firefighter I took about the next 20 years off from volunteering in any public safety capacity. But I'm planning to go get my EMT-Basic certification and join a local volunteer rescue squad. It's going to be a long process, since I need to re-up my Hepatitis B vaccination (nobody can find the records from where I was vaccinated 25+ years ago)... and that takes about 6 months in and of itself. And I can't take the EMT course until that's done, so it'll be the summer session of next year before I can get that knocked out.
Still, I do think being involved in something like that again will be good for me. And maybe I can help somebody else in the process.
This may be one of the stupidest conspiracy theories I've ever seen.
The very foundation of the 15-minute city is not to ban cars, but to provide all essential services in a close enough radius that people don't need them in the first place.
The fact that anyone would rather drive ridiculous distances, either short or long, just to stick it to the lefties, really makes one lose faith in human nature.
It is depressing really. People actively protesting about something which is entirely in their interests. It's almost like refusing clean water and sewage
I see a lot of Ram 1500 driving, Fox News brain, middle aged men protesting about it (on Facebook), not sure I'd call them ordinary though, so you got me there.
It's even dumber because "15 minute cities" have been the norm throughout human history when most people walked to things and we didn't have zoning codes that forced automobile usage for even the most basic of everyday needs.
>The fact that anyone would rather drive ridiculous distances, either short or long, just to stick it to the lefties, really makes one lose faith in human nature.
Welcome! We have nachos in the back, drinks over on the left, and every second Friday of the month is tropical shirt day.
The resistance to the idea of walkable cities often stems from a deeply ingrained cultural perception of personal vehicles as symbols of individual freedom and empowerment. In societies where cars are integral to the social fabric, any shift away from that can ignite concerns about loss of personal liberties. The ability to move freely in one's own vehicle is seen as not just a convenience, but as a safeguard against a potentially oppressive regime that might find it easier to control a population restricted to designated walkways or public transportation. The presence of personal vehicles allows for the rapid mobilization of people for protests, uprisings, or other forms of civil unrest, providing a decentralized form of power. Therefore, the skepticism around the transition to walkable cities isn't just about lifestyle adjustments; it taps into deeper fears about the erosion of individual freedoms and collective agency.
While it's theoretically possible to block roads to prevent the movement of vehicles, doing so on a large scale presents significant logistical challenges that could weaken an authoritative regime. Roadblocks require personnel, materials, and continuous maintenance to remain effective. Every blocked road would require surveillance and manpower to enforce the restrictions, diverting resources from other operations. Moreover, road networks are often intricate and expansive, providing multiple alternative routes that would also need to be blocked and guarded. The sustained effort required would strain any regime's resources, making it a less viable long-term strategy for maintaining control.
Additionally, while blocking foot traffic might be "harder," it's crucial to recognize that pedestrian movement has its limitations in speed, distance, and the carrying capacity for supplies. The argument for the "difficulty" in blocking foot traffic seems to overlook these inherent limitations, which can be just as easily exploited to contain and control a population. For instance, restricted zones, barricades, or even curfews could be implemented in walkable areas to deter foot movement. And unlike vehicles, individuals on foot are far more susceptible to environmental factors like weather, further limiting their effectiveness in a scenario requiring rapid mobilization.
Contrary to the notion that cars are easily contained, their speed and range offer a unique form of decentralized power. The very act of needing to block roads to contain vehicular movement is a testament to the car's potency as a tool for mobilization and resistance. Therefore, while no method of transportation is completely impervious to control, the ability to move freely in one's own vehicle still offers a degree of autonomy and flexibility that can be crucial in challenging situations.
Make ADAS mandatory. Criminalize modification of firmware with death penalty, life-long working camps, or some such. Deploy geo-fence via always online ADAS.
Grid locked...
SPLYRRQ
Edit: Enforce integrity of ADAS-firmware at all times by agents of the 'Driving Quality Ensurance Agency' analog to the stuff the TSA is doing. JOBS! SECURITY! PROFIT!
Or just pump up the DMV with those powers, and the people.
Because JOBS! SECURITY! PROFIT!
> Therefore, the skepticism around the transition to walkable cities isn't just about lifestyle adjustments; it taps into deeper fears about the erosion of individual freedoms and collective agency.
I guess that the people falling for this conspiracy don't see the irony of being economically strapped to a constantly depreciating machine, that needs, at the very least, two governmental issued licenses to be legal to be driven around.
It's important to differentiate between the relative inconveniences of obtaining and maintaining a license and the absolute impediment posed by the lack of access to a personal vehicle. Governmental licenses, while a form of regulation, generally do not serve as effective tools to suppress rapid mobilization for protests, uprisings, or other civil unrest. They are largely administrative hurdles that the vast majority of citizens can and do clear, thus retaining their decentralized power of mobility.
On the other hand, a lack of access to personal vehicles entirely changes this dynamic. Without a car, the population's ability to quickly mobilize and organize diminishes substantially, thereby increasing vulnerability to central control. Protests or other forms of collective action often require rapid assembly at specific locations, sometimes far from one's residence. Public transportation routes can be easily shut down or rerouted, and walking may not be feasible over long distances or in emergencies. In this context, personal vehicles are not just a convenience; they serve as a critical enabler for civic engagement and resistance to potential tyranny. Therefore, while the economic and regulatory aspects of car ownership are not trivial, they are outweighed by the benefits of maintaining a system that allows individuals a meaningful degree of autonomous movement.
> In this context, personal vehicles are not just a convenience; they serve as a critical enabler for civic engagement and resistance to potential tyranny.
These "self organizing concerned citizens agains tyranny" are one hundred percent not aligned with the general European sentiment, not even in the UK, first and foremost because urban density in European cities is ~4x vs those in the US. Cuts in public transportation drive as much public outrage as rising gas prices.
I think that you are reading too much into this, effectively giving this conspiracy theory some semblance of rationality. You would be hard pressed to find any of the high ranked European proponents able to articulate any of the ideas you just presented. In fact, the article mentions how the conservative government in the UK are the ones pushing against 15-minute cities. Will the loons side with the government to stand against the tyranny of the government?
I think you're missing the part where human nature isn't what you think it is. We aren't as smart and moral and fair as we tell ourselves we are. We are monkeys in fancy hats.
It's extremely easy to manipulate people into doing something against their own interests. Just play off of their baser motivations: fear, greed, envy, anger. People enjoy being angry and believing someone is trying to trick them, much more than they enjoy being happy and productive and rational. Negative emotions are just stronger.
Manipulation is hardly required. Whenever 'best interests' are invoked I always think fondly back to the underground man's rant on the topic in Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground which I believe is some of the most fundamentally piercing insight into human behavior in existence. The most fundamental interest is ultimately doing whatever the hell I want at any given moment.
in my defense this is such a culturally american thing to be opposed to walkable cities that I can scarcely comprehend how a country with a far less car-dependent infrastructure could fall for this nonsense, also I have slept 2.5 hours
None of the people named in the story are American.
The article is about members of the UK government including the PM reacting to an idea proposed by "Carlos Moreno, a French urban designer and professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris."
Jordan Peterson (a Canadian) is also mentioned as a supporter of the conspiracy theory.
I can see why you jumped to your incorrect assumption, but it is wrong.
I see this as an unabridged positive. Your political movement (urbanism, in this case) doesn't matter if it doesn't get traction, and this is what traction looks like in the USA.
Kooks come out of the woodwork, grifters will attach themselves, and your policies will slowly be adopted. Seems like progress to me.
I am really confused about the modern meaning of "conspiracy theory" because hyper-urbanism and reduction or outlawing personal travel for middle class people are open progressive policy goals.
The purpose of using this terminology is that it is a technique used to frame the reader's view of the story and the actors in it, in a very specific way to achieve the thought patterns desired by the writer/publisher/etc. It is classic in-group vs. out-group non-sense used to divide people. The hint that I am right will be all the downvotes this post receives.
At some level it seems deliberate - For example the breathless reporting re: "conspiracy theorists believe that 5G radiation activates microchips in COVID vaccines" seeds a thought terminating cliche in anyone concerned about enabling (more) pervasive surveillance through better data coverage
I think the point at which it gets talked about as a conspiracy theory is when a larger agenda and motive are ascribed to those policy goals. Much like it wasn't a conspiracy to invade Iraq, but if it was done with the purpose of enriching say, Halliburton, then the conspiracy involved was in bringing about the policy while hiding the motivation.
In this case, the conspiracy theory seems to be that 15 minute cities are being pushed as a way to prevent free movement of people by limiting their access to and use of automobiles and getting them accustomed to staying in one general place.
In consideration of stuff like the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, civil asset forfeiture, the (cold) War on Encryption, etc.: One must assume any kind of sweeping initiative or legal framework will be abused by authoritarians, who are extremely clever at doing so (comparison to security, just because you can't see how a bug can be exploited doesn't mean a clever adversary can't use it to great effect), and it is easier to prevent such things from happening in the first place than it is to unwind them. So opposition to a proposed "War on Urban Sprawl" is rational in the interest of caution.
I would love for it to not take an entire hour to cross the seven miles of San Francisco. BART designers imagined people being able to traverse the entire Bay Area in roughly half that amount of time: https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/5423961825
It’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s a policy objective that is rightly controversial because it specifically targets rural middle and working class people. Even as a Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander urban design advocate, it’s clear the 15min city and great reset agenda is the thin edge of the wedge on a Chinese style surveillance society. Politicians and aspiring party members have never liked having to care what working people with competence think, and destroying rural economies by isolating them from cities via anti individual policies, under the auspices of climate FUD, is part of that playbook.
15min city enforcement requires total surveillance and a defacto social credit system, which are a demolition of the societies that produced the prosperity these activists enjoy. It’s not a rational discussion anymore and like a lot of men these days, whenever I hear someone say “conspiracy theory” I just shrug and add steps and reps. These people need to know when to back off.
A few facts. The 15-minute city is a simple design goal. In the USA, most residential areas are zoned far away from commercial, making this design goal completely impossible without zoning law changes. All cities and towns built before 1910 all met this goal. This goal is not an either-or proposition: You can have a 15-minute city without the removal of cars and personal freedom. In fact personal freedom goes up, because now a middle or working class person can ride their bike to the train if they so choose. They could still take an Uber or Taxi if they wish. Anyone who reads Jane Jacobs or Christopher Alexander should already know this?
Getting in and out of the city and maintaining relationships in it is diminished. We see it with the cameras in London today. Stopping sprawl is a worthy goal, but that’s done with planning not with individual movement restrictions and monitoring. These same policy objectives produced the hellscape apartment blocks of outer paris, the poverty traps of council housing, soviet brutalist and anti human towers, and the housing projects we call ghettos. It’s all the same policy urge, which is for a govt to replace their electorates with impoverished dependents whose votes are cheap and whose lives are too tenuous to interfere with political objectives.
Monitoring is the result of poor privacy laws, not zoning regulations. In the US, we have no movement restrictions in our pre-1910, well-designed towns, so the two are not correlated here. Ghettos are not inevitable. I think a lack of transit or highway access is definitely a major concern, which is why modern planners need to ensure that dense, multi-use, 15-minute cities have both. The same mistakes were made in the US with our streetcar suburbs ... we removed the transit and ended up with many claustrophobic areas with poor access. None of this is inevitable, but it happens when planning is disregarded, and cities have illogical zoning and planning regulations, or when regulatory capture is allowed to run rampant.
Be dense and multi use, but absolutely ban surveillance by making its products inadmissible in any proceeding, and make collecting personal data without a license punishable. If you don’t do that, you get domestic passports and gesundheitpass schemes for restricting basic freedom of movement and association. You can’t advocate 15min cities and be ignorant of privacy or treat it as an externality without colluding with some very evil interests who are co-opting and fooling naive environmentalists. It’s banality of evil level stuff.
The 15min city idea is a good idea - but the problem is that they are restricting you to that area.... Do you not want to travel? Where do you family live?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadWhat I found remarkable back then was that governments were taking very strong measures against the coronavirus and not getting a lot of resistance from the population unlike the situation with global warming where an elaborate system had been built up over 40 years to prevent action.
Conspiracy theories and populist resistance took a little while to develop and certain people are in an inflamed state where something like 15 minute cities or efforts to replace gas stoves will now see an intense counterattack within two weeks or less, making our situation for global governance a lot worse than it was in 2020.
It makes the issues that Habermas talks about in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legitimation_Crisis_(book)
more salient than ever and making it quite critical that governments make legitimacy an important goal, maybe even creating a "department of legitimacy" which could quite directly pay dividends.
There is no Legitimation Crisis. That phenomenon is a result of society healing itself from the scourge of all authoritarians.
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work [quotas].
Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
> "Die Lösung" ("The Solution") is a famous satirical German poem by Bertolt Brecht about the East German uprising of 1953. Written in mid-1953, it is critical of the government and was not published at the time. It was first published in 1959 in the West German newspaper Die Welt."[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung
On one hand you could make the case that popular votes can't change the laws of physics and the limitations of biology and pretending otherwise is a matter of looking into your children's eyes and thinking about them looking into their children's eyes and, given the ever-increasing stakes, some generation soon is going to die unburied.
However, there are many good reasons why the "just trust the experts" answer is not tenable not least the self-serving behavior of experts that is proven, the uncertainty in expert judgement that is inevitable, and the sense that you can get much better conformance from people for a decision that they felt they had input into.
Habermas makes it clear there is no easy way to square that circle.
Do you want things like dams, roads, a functional air traffic control system, etc? Do you, personally, know how to do all of those things? Do you think the majority of your fellow citizens do?
If you feel that your particular government does a bad job of listening to citizens and empowering experts to actually do the things then hey: that is a 100% valid complaint. But we take it a step too far when we decide that the problem is the very concept of listening to and empowering people who actually know what they are doing.
Habermas was starting to write this at the time the club of Rome was writing Limits to Growth. As much as people thought Limits to Growth was about the 1970s in the 1970s, Limits to Growth predicted things were likely to go to hell between 2020-2050, maybe 2070 if we maximized our coping strategies.
It's not as if the problem of "technocrats vs. the will of the people" is exactly a new tension. When is the last time that a single common person could really understand everything required for society-level decision making? Back in days when we lived in small packs of hunter-gatherers, and pretty much everybody in the cave could use a spear and knew which berries were okay to eat?
That's not to say I doubt his conclusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
which is not by Habermas but came out around a year before Legitimation Crisis and you’d better believe the “Club of Rome” that signed off on that book was circled by all sorts of allegations.
Those guys ran a computer model of coupled differential calculations the simulated a race between technology and population being able to make problems vs solve problems and in various scenarios resource depletion, pollution and insufficient food production eventually result in a system crash. Insofar as something is predicted to occur in a certain time that is an outcome of the model which is: (a) very sample, but (b) run many different times with different parameters (e.g. if you double the supply of natural resources the crisis breaks later but the fundamental picture doesn’t change.)
The thing was people were really inclined to think the world was going to hell in the 1970s, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_the_Gold_Rush_(song)
and many people who heard about Limits to Growth probably thought it was predicting an imminent crash and not something their great grandchildren would be living through.
Go play with some lead paint and stick it to the libs.
Quote is from Bloomberg, not Fox:
https://archive.ph/pMVey
Fox was telling people "the government is coming for YOUR oven" as if people would have to get rid of their existing ovens.
I support banning or restricting or discouraging the use of indoor appliances that cause documented health issues to any user. I don't support lead paint or leaded gasoline or smoking near gas pumps. The tyranny.
Citation needed. I don't see that in any of the print articles I can find on Fox, was it on one of their TV segments?
Edit: I did find this - https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/5-ways-biden-still-coming-yo...
And sensationalist headline aside, it's very factual about actual policies (either proposed or being implemented) that will make gas stoves more expensive to purchase and operate. Nowhere does the article claim that the government is planning on busting into houses to take away existing stoves.
Edit 2: I have to wonder, if a Republican politician was proposing a ban on the sale of new hybrids, and a leftwing outlet wrote an article with the title "The GOP is coming for your Prius" would you take as much offense at it? The headlines about gas stoves that I've seen don't seem much different than, say, a lot of the headlines I saw from the left about abortion after Row v. Wade was overturned.
> I was saying that the coronavirus was a fire drill for global governance and would be a test of our ability to react to bigger problems like climate change.
This is an interesting analogy. You talk about conspiracy theories and populist resistance (which were and are rampant) but let's not pretend that the "fire fighters" weren't at times sitting inside the very building that's ostensibly on fire drinking fine wine tea and eating fois gras. There were countless examples of the ruling class making exceptions to lockdowns / covid policy for their friends and political causes-du-jour while being outright draconian in restrictions to activities and groups that did not fall in line.
The most obvious example in the US being the riots in 2020 surrounding BLM and the George Floyd killing vs people not being allowed to go to church services. Certainly, the zeitgeist from the media and ruling class would lead you to believe one was righteous and good while the other was "literally killing people".
Alternatively, if you don't want a "culture war" example: small businesses were forced to shut their doors while big box retailers were allowed to remain open under the guise of being "essential businesses". How many of the small hardware stores survived COVID vs Lowes and Home Depot, both of which made record profits?
Or, a more personal example: A very close relative of mine passed during COVID yet we were not allowed to have a funeral for her. We followed all the prescribed precautions - vaccine, masking, social distancing, testing...all of it. When a high-ranking politician (John Lewis) passed, not only was his family allowed a funeral, they managed to have three former Presidents of the United States in attendance!
A "department of legitimacy" would have to give out a lot of tough love and crack down on delegitimizing behavior, that's for sure.
As case studies I would point out: (1) a sector of Republicans who pursue one kind of legitimacy, "sticking to their guns" and posturing with extreme positions (e.g. they feel like they have at least do something to buy the perception of legitimacy of somebody) and (2) Democrats who take legitimacy for granted (I'm Hillary Clinton, of course I am legitimate). In Hillary's case there was that experience of being on the receiving end of Richard Mellon Scaife's (oddly an unnamed villain in https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Sum-Society-Distribution-Possibi...) war against her husband which convinced her that any illegitimacy perceptions were part of a "vast right wing conspiracy" thus nobody could have convinced her that she could have changed her behavior and won in 2016.
*BAAAA!*
I'm hoping that I'm wrong, and that events come along and smack me in the face and show me just how wrong I am, in my lifetime. But as it stands today optimism is a hard thing to come by. And that's hard for me to say, as somebody who has spent ~50 years thinking of himself as an optimist at heart. :-(
Maybe reading Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature or something would help restore some of my optimism. Dunno.
Granted, we've got problems ecological, social, demographic, and so forth. But these don't seem to be greater than the problems we've overcome in the past.
Hopefully just "recency bias" and a weird, momentary, glitch in the development of our society! That is to say, hopefully I'm just over-reacting to something very short-term.
But to answer the question:
There are a lot of factors, and some are probably stronger signals, and some are weaker. So my sentiment right now is more about the summation of a lot of "things" that, taken collectively, seem to me to paint a dismal picture. I mean:
(this will be a very US centric list, BTW)
1. A flaming moron and wannabe authoritarian like Donald Trump being elected POTUS. And what appeared to be an associated, pronounced, increase in the overall level of hatred, jingoism, and bigotry during his term.[1]
2. That a senile, decrepit, useless POS like Joe Biden is the best we can do to replace Trump.
3. That Trump is (apparently) being taken seriously as a POTUS candidate again.
4. That Trump or Biden will very likely be the next POTUS.
5. The repeal of Roe vs. Wade
6. That on the Republican side, even though Trump may be the presumptive nominee, there does not seem to be a single member of the group of challengers who is worth a shit. Basically no high profile Republican is willing to be the "adult in the room" and both A. call out Trump for being the piece of shit he is, and B. behave like a reasonable, rational, educated, dignified adult.
7. Climate change, and the lack of progress we seem to be making in addressing it.
8. Economically, we seem pathologically incapable of rooting out corruption, regulatory capture, and cronyism. Creating the kind of Capitalism that should be just a straw-man caricature used by advocates of other ideologies. But no, we've actualized it into reality.
9. Globally, the overall rise in the appeal of authoritarian / dictatorial leaders.
10. Globally, an apparent rise in the appeal of nationalism and the associated behaviors: jingoism, hatred, bigotry, racism.
11. Decaying infrastructure: bridges collapsing, trains derailing, people being killed.
12. Our seeming inability to get a handle on excessive use of force by police.
13. Our inability to reign in "civil asset forfeiture"
14. The rise of nutty conspiracy theories and the cult like behavior of the followers of this crap (qanon, for example, but also this "15 minute city" stuff, etc)
15. Watching our technological progress all too often be used for deleterious ends, and fostering an increase in concentration of power. Facial recognition, gait analysis, etc. being used by governments to surveil their citizenry, etc.
16. Homelessness seems to be on the rise, at least locally in my area. Seems like every couple of weeks or so I see more and more people panhandling around the area, and see more tents popping up in the woods on the edge of highways. I haven't looked up the stats nationwide, but I suspect this is a growing problem all over the US (and maybe in other places).
17. I'm sure I could go on, but what's the point. I imagine anybody reading this either gets the point or they don't (note that that's orthogonal to whether or not anyone agrees that all of these items are, in fact, reasons for despair).
[1]: Note - I'm not saying Trump is a racist or anything, or even that he intentionally inspired that kind of behavior in people. But I think the point that he somehow manages to bring out the worst in people is beyond question.
The conspiracy theories are not merely gullible or greedy. They are actively choosing to be cruel. Gullibility can be taught; greedy can be negotiated. I have no tools for mitigating the craving for cruelty.
> Curious what makes you feel that way about the future? I ask because on countless objective measures, mankind is better off now than at any time in history.
"Objective measures" tend to by kind of myopic (e.g. a hyperbolic example: you're politically powerless and don't have healthcare but you're objectively better off because have color TV which not even kings had in the past). They're a data-driven trap that often blind over-analytical people like software engineers.
One thing that sucks more now is the greater interconnectedness of society. It's gotten to the point where local connectedness is weakening and withering, preventing people from finding security in a comfortable, agreeable community that's not constantly being buffeted from the outside. That pushes the atomized people into a fearful panic-mode, which increases mistrust and the appeal of conspiracy theories. It's a hard problem to solve because modern-day dogma says more interconnectedness = more better!
And you'll have to prove those measures are objective, too.
Sort of reminds me of economic cycles -- with great leverage comes great liquidity, but also, great instability.
Working on it. After spending over a decade as a volunteer firefighter I took about the next 20 years off from volunteering in any public safety capacity. But I'm planning to go get my EMT-Basic certification and join a local volunteer rescue squad. It's going to be a long process, since I need to re-up my Hepatitis B vaccination (nobody can find the records from where I was vaccinated 25+ years ago)... and that takes about 6 months in and of itself. And I can't take the EMT course until that's done, so it'll be the summer session of next year before I can get that knocked out.
Still, I do think being involved in something like that again will be good for me. And maybe I can help somebody else in the process.
The very foundation of the 15-minute city is not to ban cars, but to provide all essential services in a close enough radius that people don't need them in the first place.
The fact that anyone would rather drive ridiculous distances, either short or long, just to stick it to the lefties, really makes one lose faith in human nature.
Welcome! We have nachos in the back, drinks over on the left, and every second Friday of the month is tropical shirt day.
Blocking people moving on foot is much harder.
Additionally, while blocking foot traffic might be "harder," it's crucial to recognize that pedestrian movement has its limitations in speed, distance, and the carrying capacity for supplies. The argument for the "difficulty" in blocking foot traffic seems to overlook these inherent limitations, which can be just as easily exploited to contain and control a population. For instance, restricted zones, barricades, or even curfews could be implemented in walkable areas to deter foot movement. And unlike vehicles, individuals on foot are far more susceptible to environmental factors like weather, further limiting their effectiveness in a scenario requiring rapid mobilization.
Contrary to the notion that cars are easily contained, their speed and range offer a unique form of decentralized power. The very act of needing to block roads to contain vehicular movement is a testament to the car's potency as a tool for mobilization and resistance. Therefore, while no method of transportation is completely impervious to control, the ability to move freely in one's own vehicle still offers a degree of autonomy and flexibility that can be crucial in challenging situations.
Cars also make excellent roadblocks.
SPLYRRQ
Edit: Enforce integrity of ADAS-firmware at all times by agents of the 'Driving Quality Ensurance Agency' analog to the stuff the TSA is doing. JOBS! SECURITY! PROFIT! Or just pump up the DMV with those powers, and the people. Because JOBS! SECURITY! PROFIT!
I guess that the people falling for this conspiracy don't see the irony of being economically strapped to a constantly depreciating machine, that needs, at the very least, two governmental issued licenses to be legal to be driven around.
On the other hand, a lack of access to personal vehicles entirely changes this dynamic. Without a car, the population's ability to quickly mobilize and organize diminishes substantially, thereby increasing vulnerability to central control. Protests or other forms of collective action often require rapid assembly at specific locations, sometimes far from one's residence. Public transportation routes can be easily shut down or rerouted, and walking may not be feasible over long distances or in emergencies. In this context, personal vehicles are not just a convenience; they serve as a critical enabler for civic engagement and resistance to potential tyranny. Therefore, while the economic and regulatory aspects of car ownership are not trivial, they are outweighed by the benefits of maintaining a system that allows individuals a meaningful degree of autonomous movement.
These "self organizing concerned citizens agains tyranny" are one hundred percent not aligned with the general European sentiment, not even in the UK, first and foremost because urban density in European cities is ~4x vs those in the US. Cuts in public transportation drive as much public outrage as rising gas prices.
I think that you are reading too much into this, effectively giving this conspiracy theory some semblance of rationality. You would be hard pressed to find any of the high ranked European proponents able to articulate any of the ideas you just presented. In fact, the article mentions how the conservative government in the UK are the ones pushing against 15-minute cities. Will the loons side with the government to stand against the tyranny of the government?
It's extremely easy to manipulate people into doing something against their own interests. Just play off of their baser motivations: fear, greed, envy, anger. People enjoy being angry and believing someone is trying to trick them, much more than they enjoy being happy and productive and rational. Negative emotions are just stronger.
If they build these cities without all the tech BS I will be all for it.
Is there some sort of bug with HN? You talking about surveillance and your parent comment talking about amerikans... did we read the same article?
Did you miss that this article is about the UK?
The article is about members of the UK government including the PM reacting to an idea proposed by "Carlos Moreno, a French urban designer and professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris."
Jordan Peterson (a Canadian) is also mentioned as a supporter of the conspiracy theory.
I can see why you jumped to your incorrect assumption, but it is wrong.
Kooks come out of the woodwork, grifters will attach themselves, and your policies will slowly be adopted. Seems like progress to me.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Seems apropos here. Bonus fun fact: this is usually attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but apparently that attribution is questionable.
https://apnews.com/article/archive-fact-checking-2315880316
In this case, the conspiracy theory seems to be that 15 minute cities are being pushed as a way to prevent free movement of people by limiting their access to and use of automobiles and getting them accustomed to staying in one general place.
15min city enforcement requires total surveillance and a defacto social credit system, which are a demolition of the societies that produced the prosperity these activists enjoy. It’s not a rational discussion anymore and like a lot of men these days, whenever I hear someone say “conspiracy theory” I just shrug and add steps and reps. These people need to know when to back off.
Good road design and good city design go hand in hand. You have less cars on the road when people can safely walk to their doctor or supermarket.
How can such legislation help cities? If not creating unforeseen consequences.
Take off the rose-tinted glasses and look around.