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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

are suddenly passionately saying livable cities are a way to control us.

Look at what the government and Big Tech are doing. There are constant articles here being posted about surveillance, loss of privacy, etc. It's a whole lot easier to control the population when you gradually make it harder for them to travel unhindered and untracked.

Chickens in a factory farm can be described as being in "livable" conditions. After all, they are still alive and healthy enough (for a controlled period of time.)

They're only calling it a "conspiracy theory" in an attempt to discredit the other side.

Who benefits from the propagation of this idea?

Everyone who still believes in freedom.

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Do you consider bike centric cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam not free?

The concept of "cars == freedom" is completely absurd to me. The mode of transport that has a unique identifier printed on it, that you need a licence to drive that can be revoked, that you have to pay the government to use, is considered the beacon of free and open transport.

In fact, many car centric city designs force you to own a car which seems like the opposite of freedom.

You control the population through psychological isolation, not physical isolation. In general, people driving cars are no harder to control than people without cars. They are no harder to track. Like, at all.

You also have to realize that the only car that increases your freedom is your own: everybody else's reduces your freedom. They take a lot of space, they make a lot of noise, they reduce visibility, they hinder pedestrian and bicycle movement, and so on. If you believe in freedom, you have to be holistic about it and learn to make some compromises.

True freedom includes the freedom to do things others might not like.

I happen to like the space and enjoy the noise.[1] So does nearly everyone around me.

You can squeeze together in your claustrophobic factory-farm cities if you like, but leave those who don't out of it.

[1] I highly recommend taking a ride in a 70s "land yacht" with a mildly tuned engine sometime. It might change your perception of cars entirely if all you've been in are cramped sluggish econoboxes.

You enjoy the noise of cars rolling next to you when you are dining on a terrace? You like to listen to their sweet lullaby when you are reading on your balcony? That's... interesting, I guess?

We are not talking about freedom, we are talking about entitlement. You are not entitled to free parking on the side of streets, nor to be able to drive on every single street, nor to do so at a high speed, nor to be as noisy as you want to be. Other people have needs too. People need space to walk, they need space to bike, and in many cases this space has to be taken from space that was previously dedicated to cars, because that's all there is. It's only fair.

In any case, no one is forcing you to live in a city. Live wherever you want. But many people like them, and people who like cities tend to like them even more when there are fewer cars (not zero -- fewer). If you don't like it, that's fine. Stay in your paradise, and stay out of ours (or park at the bus station).

Yes I like the sound of cars, especially American ones from an era when it was actually a great country and the majority of the population wasn't being squeezed out of owning things by the government and rich elites.

You are not "entitled" to walk or bike either.

But how is advocating having a supermarket within walk-able distance from your home the same thing as making it hard to travel untracked?

> It's a whole lot easier to control the population when you gradually make it harder for them to travel unhindered and untracked.

Cars are required to have registration and license plates, and most of them have GPS tracking as well. If you don't want to be tracked, ride a bicycle.

Plates are only visible from a line of sight (and there has been tons of opposition to automatically reading them with cameras, for good reason.) My car has GPS but that's just a receiver.

Have you tried to take a 500-mile trip on a bicycle? While carrying a hundred pounds of luggage?

Urbanism is in fact premised on making it EASIER to move about unhindered

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