The 15-minute city conspiracy theory goes mainstream
wired.com
wired.com
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.
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.
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]
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
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.
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.
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:
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!*
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.
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.
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.
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.
Take off the rose-tinted glasses and look around.
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.