Tech Won't Save Us - How Urban Tech Increases Corporate Control w/ David Banks

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by David Banks to discuss how tech solutions to increase corporate control in cities will be sold to us as fun and convenient, and what that will actually means for access and equity in urban life.David Banks is a visiting assistant professor at the University at Albany. He’s the editor-at-large at Real Life, and has written for The Baffler, e-flux architecture, and Current Affairs. Follow David on Twitter as @DA_Banks.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Read David’s articles for Real Life on the subscriber city and e-flux architecture on software as infrastructure.Paris wrote about the end of the Paramount Decrees, including what it could mean for the future of cinemas.How people are fighting back against landlords attempts to use tech against tenants (“proptech”).Slavoj Žižek gives a father/son example of totalitarianism (from ~0:00-3:00).David Harvey’s “Right to the City” essay mentions how homeownership makes people more conservative.Red Vienna remains a great example of public housing.Kevin Rogan wrote about how smart-city technologies are designed to hide human labor.Books in this show: “Radicalized” by Cory Doctorow, “Urban Warfare” by Raquel Rolnik, “Capital City” by Samuel Stein, and “Loft Living” by Sharon ZukinSupport the show

It's important to keep an eye on all the fun, glitzy things that are eventually going to turn into control. That's a big part of this is that often convenience will turn into control. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is David Banks. David is a visiting assistant professor in the geography and planning department at the University at Albany. He's also an editor-at-large at RealLife and has written for the Baffler, Eflux Architecture, Current Affairs, and a number of others. He's also currently writing a book about how cities act like reality TV stars for the University of California Press, and I'm sure

we'll get more information about that as he gets closer to finishing it. We have a really interesting conversation today about the intersection between technology and cities and how the integration of more technologies into urban life will be really cool and exciting for some people, but will also serve to close off access to parts of the city for urban residents who don't have those privileges, and how we need to be paying attention to these potential downsides to all of this new technology before it's fully implemented and we just accept the corporate control that comes with it. I'm really excited for you to hear this conversation, but before we get into it,

I just want to make a quick note about the schedule for the next few weeks. I was planning to take a week off at the end of the year, but I was thinking about it and I know a lot of people are still in lockdown and won't be able to visit their families or will visit their families and will still want to get away for a little bit and maybe want something to listen to or just don't celebrate these holidays at all. And so it's completely irrelevant to them. So I decided I'm going to keep making episodes, releasing episodes through the holidays. The only difference is that next week's episode and the episode after that will be released on Wednesdays instead of Thursdays, just because I figured those days were too close to Christmas and New Year's.

So next week's episode, instead of being on December 24th, will be on December 23rd. And the week after that, instead of December 31st, it'll be December 30th. And just to give you a preview of what's coming next week, I'll be speaking to Tim Mohn, who is the author of Infinite Detail, a fantastic science fiction book that looks at important questions about technology, their relationships to supply chains, and making everything that we do in our daily lives possible, as well as what might happen if the internet were to go down permanently. Then the week after that, I'm speaking to Matthew Lawrence, who is the founder and director of Commonwealth, and Thomas Hanna, who is the research director at Democracy Collaborative, about their new

report on efforts to rein in these tech platforms, but also how we create a system that promotes the creation of cooperative platforms, public platforms, democratically controlled platforms that serve the public good. Then in the new year, I'll be speaking to Anna Wiener, who's the author of Uncanny Valley, a memoir that came out at the beginning of this year. And we'll be talking about her book, certainly, but many other topics relating to Silicon Valley as well. And then after that, I'll be speaking to Salome Fulion, who is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center, about data governance, but in particular about data egalitarianism.

So that's just a preview of what's coming up in the next few weeks. And just a final note that some of these next few episodes, as you might've noticed from last week, will be a little bit longer than usual, just because we dug in a lot in these conversations, but I think you're still going to enjoy them and hopefully they'll still be

at a manageable length for you. And just remember, Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, which you can find out more about at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like our conversation today, please make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would like it because that social proof helps to encourage more people to try the show and listen to the show. And obviously, if you appreciate the work that I put into making this show every week and you want to make sure I can keep doing it, you can join supporters like Willie Costello, Cameron Pollitt, and Vance Ricks by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy the conversation.

David, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to speak with you. I've been reading some of your pieces on the intersection between technology and cities and what tech companies are increasingly looking to do in cities. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. One of the kind of concepts that really stood out to me because it's one that falls within technology and physical space is that idea of the kind of concepts that really stood out to me, because it's one that falls within technology and physical space, is that idea of the walled garden, right? We typically associate it with what these companies are doing to keep us in their ecosystems and on their platforms and to ensure that it's really difficult for us to kind of get outside those or, you know, access that outside or whatever while we're within their ecosystem. But obviously that idea comes

from, you know, something that happened in physical space before it. But in your writing, you also argue that we also now see those tech companies kind of pushing this idea back into physical space back into the city in order to enclose different areas of the city itself. So what's going on here? And how should we understand that term in terms of, you know, the developments that we're seeing in terms of technology in the city? As you said, it begins with, in the States, it was AT&T with control over the phone grid. And then later, it was stuff like, you know, America Online and all these, and CompuServe, these companies that would sort of put a wrapper around the internet, and you'd maybe just have like one little hole through the wall that you could get through and

visit someone's GeoCities page or something. And the difference now is that in part, it's a technological affordance, right? It's all the sensors in our phones, it's the 5G globalists, no, you know, it's all these antennas and you can be on the internet anywhere. And so that enables different sorts of control that are often sort of invisible. So the example that I give is like, well, you know, maybe your landlord lets you pay, lets you, asks you to pay rent through like Venmo or something, right? Like some like app. And then it's like, and that's really kind of like a small step. Really, you know, it's all it needs is like one person in a boardroom somewhere to come up with the idea of like, hey, you know, how about

we get in on the landlord game and say, you know, hey, landlords, how you doing? What if we give you some incentive packages, you know, you get paid instantly, faster, easier, if you require rent payments through our platform. And then if that happens, right, what do you think Venmo would offer, right? You know, like vetting of potential leases, you know, background checks, you know, credit score checks, you know, they'll just do all that for you, right? And what would result from that would be, you know, if someone gets blackballed from the system, they say, you know, your credit score isn't good enough, all of a sudden, all that housing stock is no longer available to you. And, you know, we can connect

that to all sorts of legal issues. You know, for example, you know, a couple of years ago that a lot of sex workers have said that, you know, they were getting booted off of tons of different platforms, a lot of them for payment, but a lot of them also just like Amazon, would they just like delete their wish lists and stuff like that? You should care about sex workers. But if you don't, you know, that you can still at least care about them as a canary in the coal mine, as like, you know, this will happen to you, where you can just get booted from systems. And all of a sudden, stuff that is physically close to you, right? Like the city still looks exactly the same and yet somehow entire swaths of it are no longer available to you. You can't rent them. You might not even be able to go into them

for like smart locks or they might just be watching you on an Amazon ring. But what I focus on a little bit more than any of those in my writing is how like cashless economies will just let you all of a sudden like, sure, you can go into the store, but you can't leave with anything. They won't serve you if you don't have like a subscription or an account with some company. Yeah, definitely. Like good luck going to shop at the Amazon Go cashierless store if you don't have an Amazon account or you've been banned from Amazon, right? Exactly, exactly. Not going to happen. I think that've been banned from Amazon, right? Exactly, exactly.

Not going to happen. I think that's a really good point, right? And it really helps to kind of get us into this idea and to see what's actually happening in the cities and the potential that increasing reliance on these powerful platforms can have, right? I feel like during this pandemic, we've already seen discussion of, I think, what's called prop tech, like property technologies that landlords can use to further kind of surveil and control the kind of populations that rent their units and things like that, right? Whether it's putting new technologies in the unit itself that they have to rely on, or, you know, just ensuring that they need to go through these companies to kind of get access to the apartment

to pay their rent, et cetera, et cetera. And it creates new ways that renters then kind of lose the autonomy to these landlords and to powerful actors. It actually brings to mind, I don't know if you've read Cory Doctorow's Radicalized, but one of the stories in there is he writes about how there's these kind of like immigrants to the United States and they live in this kind of apartment building, but all of the appliances have like DRM baked into them. And so you can only use like certain products in those toasters or whatever. And they're obviously much more expensive because, you know, you're very limited in terms of what you can use, right? Very doctoral. Very much so. And obviously, you know, what you're talking about is much further beyond that. But I

think it's one example of how these technologies could be used in very kind of oppressive ways. Absolutely. I think some of it can breed comedy, like is it's just like so ridiculous, like the Internet of Shit account, you know, is like quite often, like, because a lot of these things, they like work really poorly, right? Because the goal is, of course, not, you know, whatever Amazon says about being customer obsessed, which sounds creepy. I don't know who greenlit that phrase. But even then, right, what they're obsessed with is making sure that you pay an exorbitant price for something connected to their system, not because it makes it easier or better to actually use the thing or whatever, right? So this is all about creating environments within which the company is not a participant,

but is like the referee is the controller, right? A long time ago, well, gosh, it feels like a long time ago, probably like 2017 or something. I was quoted in New York Magazine talking about Facebook and like, what the hell is Facebook? Like, what does it want? Like, what is its goals, right? Other than to be like, you know, like the platform for what used to be AOL chain emails and racist memes from grandma, right? Like, what is Facebook? I argued that it was trying to be an environment. At the end of the day, and this goes well beyond internet companies, it's just like any company of sufficient size, at some point, they no longer are satisfied with, they can't get the profits of just being the biggest contender in the game, right? They have to envelop the game itself, right? They have to become the environment. And what that means for something like Facebook, right, have to become the environment. And what that means for something like Facebook, right, is to become the platform on which other social media and data and advertising

takes shape and competes in. For Amazon, that usually means that they sell other people's stuff. They become a marketplace. They're not just one competitor against like Walmart and Target. And that becomes really clear when you actually look at where Amazon makes its money, right? I think they basically break even on a lot of what they actually sell, you know, like what you buy and shows up at your door. There they break even what they make money off of is the data of that selling that they sell to advertisers in from their Amazon Web Services. So that even if you're like, oh, man, you know, Amazon's evil, I'm not going to watch videos on Amazon Prime, I'm going to watch them on Netflix. And then you find out, you know,

Netflix is completely served on Amazon Web Services, right? So it's like, I haven't looked at their at their sheets. But you know, like you imagine, like Netflix probably pays on the order of like a quarter to a third of their revenue just goes directly to Amazon. And that's what real power looks like is even when your competitors do well, you get paid. And we have to start thinking about how that is going to look in cities, right? Because they're going to start looking for other avenues of profit, new frontiers of profit that they can crack open and suck out a profit marrow. I don't know. Sure. Let's go with that. Little mixed metaphors there.

That works. Yeah. I think that's a really good point, though. And, you know, I feel like Amazon is this company that I think of most when I think of like these major platforms kind of moving into urban space. Obviously, Google is doing it as well. And, you know, other major ones. But I feel like Amazon, through its prime services, through the way that it owns Whole Foods, and now you get benefits at Whole Foods if you're a prime member. And even when there was discussion a number of months ago about movie theaters and what was going to happen to movie theaters. And obviously, the US government repealed the Paramount decrees, which kind of said that companies that make movies can't also own theaters. And so now that's like fair game. I was like, okay, so now what if Amazon like buys up all the theaters and now there's like a prime benefit to that. And so just thinking through all these implications, you obviously outlined this idea of the subscriber city, right? Where these platforms do have much more control over what goes on in the city and kind of mediates all these aspects of urban life. So what is the subscriber city? And what do you see as being like the biggest issues and

implications of that model? There's one essay in real life that is titled that and I also looked at it in my eflux article that came out last January. What I'm investigating in both is like what happens when you know your favorite diner, or even like your little quaint downtown that you might live next to or the urban village that you frequent in like your neighborhood of a larger city. Like what happens when you one day go in there? We don't accept cash, we accept points on some sort of subscription service. But don't worry, because now things are actually cheaper on the subscription service. So hey, you're practically making money drinking here. What I really always want to focus on is that some of this stuff is

gonna be really cool and fun, right? Like, you know, what brings you in and if it's not a misceration, right? They can't use a stick all the time, they're going to use a couple of very delicious carrots. And those carrots are going to be stuff like free drinks or loyalty programs that actually give you stuff, you know, they're getting better at these loyalty programs, you like Apple card gives you directly cash, like every week, and it's like, you know, five cents or whatever, unless you unless you're a big spender, right? But it's there, right? And it's on like a gift card, and you just like pay it instantly. And so they're moving away from these like really cheesy point based systems that are obviously a scam, and things that are a scam at like a much higher level that just have like a little bit of a nicer sheen to them. And so the subscriber city is now

like basically tollbooths on everything, what they call dynamic pricing, what should really just be called price discrimination. And all these sorts of on demand things can now suddenly reorient the city financially, not necessarily physically, such that you are constantly being pumped for money to get access to parts of the city that you should be able to anyway, because they are geographically proximate. But they have now been captured in these circuits of capital that prevent you from being able to access them, even if you have the cash on hand. You have to be admitted into what are essentially frequent flyer programs for your life. Of course, this isn't inevitable,

like I hope it's not. But when I write these things, it's because I don't see any reason for these firms to not do this, because it's highly profitable. It is popular often enough with most people that aren't obsessed with this stuff and live probably more balanced lives than I do. The actual happy people will take advantage of these things because they will be fun and cool and look nice and maybe even save you a little bit of money. And so it's important to kind of keep an eye on all the fun glitzy things that are eventually going to turn into control. That's a big part of this is that often convenience will turn into control. Because what starts as convenience is usually like, ah, so we the venture capitalists, you know, broke a bunch

of stuff in your life, public services don't work, we've immiserated the public coffers of pretty much everything that you rely on. So everything's broken. But hey, guess what, now you can tap your phone and a car will show up and we'll pay 40% of what it costs to run this car. And you can go anywhere. So you don't have to rely on the bus or the train that's always late. And you're like, finally, cool. And you start using it. And that starts a spiraling effect where now less and less people are using these public services. And so fare box revenue goes down. And so they get even worse. And then eventually someone goes, hey, you know, like, all that we're really paying for is like the pensions of retired cabbies and train conductors.

So let me just get rid of this thing. And now all of a sudden, he was like, Oh, well, gosh, why did Uber just jump up 40% revenue? Ah, because they're the only game in town now. And now they don't have to subsidize their rides. And now you have to pay the full price. And now all of a sudden, no one can afford to go anywhere. So now I can't afford to go anywhere. But now now they've offered a free option, but you have to take a mandatory stop at Taco Bell before going to your doctor's appointment. And like, and that's how they pay for it. And I don't see any reason why this dystopia will not happen. If companies are left to their own devices. There's no reason why this won't happen. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And obviously, I think Uber is like a very

good, but when I say good, I mean, like really terrible example of what's been happening. But I think like what you're saying about them not always having to use the stick is something that I feel like a lot of people miss or increasingly not so much, but I feel like at least in the beginning, they did. Because like, if we look at all of these kind of surveillance gadgets that are increasingly everywhere in our lives, whether it's the smart speakers and all the different smart home gadgets and increasingly stuff that's just placed within the city itself in order to better surveil people, capture data, et cetera, et cetera, that's all sold through the notion of convenience and of making your life easier, etc., etc. But, you know, it does allow these companies even more ability to track what you're doing

and increasingly to control what you're doing. Like when you look at the Alexa, if you ask Alexa to look up some product or something, it's going to do so through Amazon, right? So you're immediately kind of locked into that system. But then we can also see that expanding out into the rest of the city. And I think one of the insidious things that you kind of touched on there is this idea that for a lot of people, this is just going to seem like a convenient, fine kind of development, right? Because for a lot of people, and especially the people who have power and influence when it comes to making these decisions, these transformations

aren't going to be like a huge negative impact to their lives. It's going to be a convenient thing. It's going to improve their lives in the same way that Uber has done for many of these people. And it's why Uber, at least until recently, hasn't seemed like an issue. And in many cases, people still use Uber very frequently, even if they have issues with it, right? Because it has become so essential to so many people. So what do you think then is the impact of this kind of development? Like if we see this actually happening, who is actually going to feel the brunt of this new change and this new development, because it's not going to be like kind of the middle class and up who will just see it as like this kind of normal, easy thing that's happening in their lives that's making things more convenient. There is kind of like a frog in boiling water situation going where I think a lot of people will experience the downsides of this.

Eventually, it comes for everyone. In the long run, we're all captured in these systems, right? But in the near term, in the shorter term, I think what you'll see is poverty, it will kind of go back to what used to exist, actually. Poverty will be administered in a way that is geographically proximate, but the innovation will be harder to see, right? So if you look at census data mapped out of like Chicago during the Gilded Age, right, on the turn of the 20th century, you will see like tenements right next to mansions, right? You will see extreme poverty fairly close to wealth. And oftentimes, that was because, you know, the people in poverty serve the people in wealth, and they had to get to work fairly quickly because you know breakfast isn't going to make itself

and so people that were poor lived fairly close to wealth but they were hidden okay right they did an okay job you know you could still smell them and by them i mean the wealthy people these wealthy people smell bad then you go through to like the middle of the 20th century and people start spreading apart you know this very generally speaking, right? And you get concentrations of poverty through redlining, and the concentration of public housing in North America, and then white people were allowed to flee the city in suburbs with cars. In that sense, it's sort of an aberration, like so many things of the mid 20th century, that we tend to think of as normal, but are in the long run, total aberrations, is that we concentrated wealth and poverty to a great degree, and they're physically separate,

to the point that, you know, you could live in a poor neighborhood and just like never meet someone that isn't on the dole ever. And now I think we're probably gonna go back to what again, in the long run is a normal situation where people in poverty will live very close to rich people. But these new network systems will make it even easier to hide them, right? So you can get into your kind of self-driving car, right? Your semi-autonomous car, and it will route you around poor neighborhoods, or what's probably more likely because you don't want to inconvenience the rich by rerouting them, you will reroute the poor, right? You'll keep them completely out of systems, or you will give them these circuitous routes that take 20 minutes, 30 minutes, five hours longer,

just so that, you know, people don't have to see them. That's the sort of stuff that will certainly happen. And we can start seeing that in Singapore, where people like Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, right, these technocrats that run big cities in North America, just absolutely love talking about Singapore. And why is that? It's because it's a capitalist dystopia, where the citizens, you know, the full fledged citizens live lovely lives that are clean and easy and have these beautiful, sumptuous things to look at and smell and taste and eat and whatever. But the poor are not citizens. They're all immigrants, and their lives are totally controlled, usually by these Saudi-backed construction firms that build the

gleaming towers. And this is the last essay that I wrote. The immigrant workers, mostly from Bangladesh and India and Malaysia, all live in dorms. Even during COVID, they live like 12 people to a dorm, have public bathrooms. They are tested daily while everyone else in Singapore can voluntarily opt into this tracing program called Trace Together. But for these immigrant workers, it's mandatory. So they're constantly monitored. They are brought from their dorms to the construction site by a company van. They're not allowed to leave in any other capacity. Both work and home, scare quotes around home, are guarded. And what we've been talking about with like these carrots is that usually, you know, the command and control society, we'll go Frankfurt School here, right? Isn't just like, don't do that. Sometimes it's like, wouldn't you like to do this? And the wouldn't you like to do this is what I think we'll see a lot of and it's harder to theorize, right? Because usually when we want to talk about control, we're like, ah, you know, it's a police officer beating you up. And of course, that exists. But what is probably going to work on most people, right? If you think of, you know, being someone that's very powerful, how do you want to control people, you don't necessarily want to constantly be beating people in the streets that looks bad. So what you want to do is say, I'm giving you things and people willingly take on these control mechanisms. So if it's like,

oh, gosh, free trip to Taco Bell, right? You know, like, that's cool. You read my Amazon search history, and you know that I just picked up a grinder and a new tobacco pipe, right? And so now you send me to Taco Bell, but you know me. That's, I think, a lot of what we'll see. And it'll be fun. It'll be interesting. And it'll be novel for a while. But then eventually, it's like, oh, man, I am late to work, and I can't stop at Taco

Bell. But now I have to because I can't afford the direct drive to work, right? Yeah, no, you could definitely see those things playing out. And, you know, you gave that example of like control. It brought to mind something that I heard Slavoj Zizek say like years and years ago, just about, you know, you can have like this father and the son and they're going to visit like the grandmother. And in one instance, the father can come and be like, we're going to visit grandma, it doesn't matter, like if you want to or not, we're going and the son can like kick up a fit, but you know, it's still going to go. But then in the other instance, he says,

don't you want to go visit your grandma or something like that? And it's like, you can't say no, because it's your grandma, but then it kind of takes away that ability for you to even like push back in any sort of way just because of how it's framed. But I think to your broader point about how these systems are eventually going to come for all of this, what you described about Singapore really shows how these systems can be used. And I feel like they slowly get expanded out to more and more people, right? When they're tried on the populations that have the least ability to push back. And we even see that to a certain stuck in these really low paying service jobs having to rely on like Uber and the

gig economy. And now we see, you know, in this pandemic, these companies are much better entrenched. And we're seeing many more people have to rely on them. And now we're seeing their ability to further entrench their idea of kind of rolling back labor rights and workers' rights and things like that, right? So we can see how over time, these things really do encompass more and more people, even if many of the people who make the decisions and are really unaffected by this do not really pay attention to what's going on here, right? Yeah, I mean, we're recording here in December. And like, we're seeing like half a dozen firms that do nothing but this sort of stuff racing to get

an IPO out by the end of the year with these like ridiculous valuations. And this morning, I woke up it was a DoorDash has something like a $30 billion valuation. And it's like you already do what two other companies do. And Grubhub actually makes money. They're the only ones that have actually bothered to like pivot and make a frickin profit. Not that that's good. But you know, it's like it's at least what the live capitalism is supposed to do. But instead, you know, like DoorDash, like like Uber and all these other companies like Tesla, I like to describe them as just like burning piles of cash. And what the venture capitalists do is they just sort of like push the burning pile of cash onto things that actually work so that it burns down too. And then they can just like gobble all of it up.

And now all of a sudden you've reprivatized all these things that used to be at least somewhat public or have some motivation other than capital accumulation. I could understand someone listening to this and still like being a little skeptical of the push mechanisms writ large that bring us to this situation. So we can do the immortal science on this, right? And understand why this has to happen for capitalism to continue. So, you know, here we go. Marx says that workers need to be doubly free, right? They need to be free from familial relationships, right? And even arch conservatives are starting to realize this, right? So like Tucker Carlson has started saying stuff like corporations don't care about your family. And usually this is because they see that they're losing the culture war, you know, Pepsi is going to make you gay or whatever. They think these things. And so he's kind of responding to that. But I think he's also, whether he knows it or not,

right, is like responding to this fact that capitalism has to free you from associations, right? You have to be a flexible worker that can go work at DoorDash one week, and then the next week be an Uber driver. And the week after that, gosh, who even knows, have an OnlyFans account. You have to be all these different things. You can't say to a possible employer, ah, no, my last name is Smith. I can only be a blacksmith or something like that. And we've pretty much done that one. That's been thoroughly done for a long time that most people feel free to take whatever

job they are accredited to do. But what we still haven't really gotten past is the second freedom, which is the freedom to move around and not be connected to a piece of land. And even now when it's great if you can get a year-long lease now and you own less and less things, but still moving is a pain in the ass. That's just the truth. And so what a lot of these companies want to do is make that easier. And that's why I've started to get obsessed with these like co-living companies. It will be interesting to see what happens after the pandemic. A lot of them will probably collapse and consolidate. A lot of people said, you know, like, well, once WeWork flamed out, oh, okay, this is all

done now. But it obviously is not. I think SoftBank, the major stakeholder of WeWork, learned is that these sorts of companies aren't supposed to be very well branded. They have to work in the background and they have to have another shell on top of them in order to really work. So I think we're going to see less brash, bombastic stuff like WeWork and we'll see much more subtle versions of the same thing, which is basically own as little things as possible, which is starting to sound not very capitalistic, right? Own as few things as possible, rent as many things as possible. And it doesn't even have to be like the rent-a-center version, the version 1.0 of rent everything, which is, you know, we're going to charge you an arm and a leg and repo everything as soon as you miss a payment, right? That's what we do to the poorest people. We're not going to do that. We're going to do something that looks a little bit nicer again, right? And kind of a

carrot here, where you don't own almost anything, which makes it that much easier to move, right? Because you don't have to move anything, you just order stuff, and it'll show up somewhere else. And we're going to Spotify the housing market. And this is a direct phrase from like some of the leaders of these like trade organizations in real estate and development, where they say, you know, we have this classic problem of a lot of commercial and residential real estate goes vacant for a long time. We have like this sorting problem where we can't match people who need space with people who want it in these much finer clusters of time and space, right? So this is essentially a logistics problem. And it's one of the few things that this 21st century economy actually does, right? A lot of it's financialization, which has

no practical merit. But the one practical thing that we are very good at now is logistics and making sure things go to where they need to be at a certain place in time. And so we can start leasing out space at a premium in smaller chunks of time, even like, you know, you rent a desk for half an hour even, right? So you can get really, really finely grained. And what that does is that frees up the workforce to move at the speed of capital, right? So now this is how I opened my eFlux article, right? Because you can be a very well-paid professional.

In my case, it was an architect, right? And you can wake up in Brooklyn and then take a job in Dubai and like, say goodbye to your flatmates. And just like everything is sort of connected to this one account where you pick a new room somewhere else, it's already furnished, ready to go for you. It feels a lot like home when you're in there, it looks almost the same, probably because it's all based on your preferences. The only differences are these key signifiers that are sort of the vestige of regional cultures. You replace the little widget that's on the desk or something like that, or, the free breakfast in the kitchen is tabbouleh instead of a bagel and schmear or whatever. And of course, like all these things are vastly simplified and do great harm to cultures themselves, right?

The way I said about tabooly, you know, it's like, it's just like what some executive might think exists in that region or whatever. You know, so I see that as like, who's getting wrapped up in this as everybody, it will look different for different people. But the reason for it, the big sell here is that capitalism needs it. They need to free up people to move around. And sometimes it looks like restriction. A lot of people can't go to the downtown that they live next to, they can't shop at the store that they live above. You have to be able to do that. But at the same time, you also have to have that same person be very easily moved around to wherever they need for what few jobs remain. I think this is a really important point. And it was something that I was planning to ask you about.

So I just want to kind of like double down on it for a minute. Because obviously, in the postwar period, we saw this explicit policy of promoting homeownership and also mass consumption, right. And that was really essential to growing the capitalist economy. But also, you know, the project of homeownership ensured that people were invested in the system, and we're not going to really push back against the trajectory of capitalism, right? And we see that, you know, there's that common expression that you get more conservative as you get older. But I saw a chart recently that suggested that that's really only the case if you own a home. If you're a renter, that's not necessarily the case, right? And Thatcher was well known for seeing homeownership

as something that was really key to kind of cementing the conservative power within the United Kingdom. So now you're describing how we're kind of switching from the system that prioritized homeownership and consumption to one that really wants workers to be increasingly precarious, can move anywhere as they're going, and are kind of paying to rent or paying for access on a subscription basis to things. So they're not really tied into this system in the same way. So how does this, how should we understand this transformation? And why is capitalism kind of wanting us to now be these kind of disconnected, precarious

beings instead of ones that are really stuck in one place and buying as much as possible to fill up some larger and larger space that we own? Great question. Yeah, the Marxist geographer David Harvey posits that widespread homeownership is like one of the more conservatizing forces you can think of, right? Because it does tie your material interests to the value of land. And that changes everything. Two other authors you read around this topic that I would highly recommend is Raquel Rolnick. I think she still does work for the UN and she has a great book out called Urban Warfare, I believe, out of Verso Press. She does a lot

of things in that book. But one thing that I find really useful, she spends two or three chapters describing the export of that model, of that home ownership model to the rest of the world, right? So it starts in the UK, as you were describing with Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan in the United States. And of course, there's the antecedents much earlier than that of like the New Deal in the United States doing essentially what was a pretty good idea, right? You have a bunch of people coming back from World War One, and then subsequently, again, in World War Two, right, you have a bunch of people coming back that are unemployed, you are scared about a double dip, depression or recession, and you have a housing shortage. So what do you

do? You put a bunch of people to work making the housing that they need, and then you make it easier to purchase through guaranteeing loans. And then, yeah, Margaret Thatcher also did that with the ability to buy back council housing at deep, deep, deep discounts, which had the effect of both reducing the amount of valuable land that the government owned, while also eliminating a lot of revenue. So it threw entire government systems just completely out of whack. So not only are you reducing the housing stock that you own, none of your numbers work anymore. So the whole thing is sabotaged. And then once the Soviet Union collapsed, rich Western nations did everything they could to export this process to former Eastern Bloc

nations, to the point that now those countries actually have higher home ownership rates than the United States. And what she outlines is, you know, what happens is now like, you have all these people that have never owned homes, and it's not that they don't know enough to own property, quite often, they've been keeping up these places anyway, because land tenure arrangements are, you know, just different other places. But you get this like glut of people like now all of a sudden demanding like all these things to fix their homes or to consolidate them, turn them from two families to one family, stuff like that. And they just the physical materials aren't there to make these changes. And so you get massive increases in these sectors of just like home improvement and building materials. And what all of this eventually points to is that once all

of these rising tides have ebb, right, governments have to figure out, okay, well, we have sapped out as much wealth as possible from these buildings, right? Because first and foremost, the exchange value actually matters more than the use value, right? It doesn't matter that this is a house, it's an investment vehicle. And so now the use value stops becoming determinative of the overall price, and you start getting the exchange value becoming more important, which is why we'll build houses in the United States, even though we have plenty of housing that is still vacant, not only because it's an investment vehicle, but also land is a unique commodity. It's still a

commodity, but it's very unique in the sense that a house in Dallas doesn't help housing prices or housing availability in Minneapolis, right? It has to be in Minneapolis to affect Minneapolis, right? So you have all these monopoly rents that can be realized in all these different places. And so all the greatest minds of the world right now are all busy trying to figure out, well, how can we free up these markets so that someone in Dallas could effectively make money by having some action regionally that would then impact Minnesota or something like that. And of course, let's be real, that does not mean that people are going to be housed better or more frequently, right? It just means how can we trade on land

in these new and inventive ways. And that's really what we're going to see a lot of. And the second book that I mentioned, Sam a lot of. And the second book that I mentioned, Sam Stein's Capital City, is the second book that I think is really important to understand the fact that as part of this longer trajectory, housing prices will always continue to go up, which is to say land prices will always go up and rents will continue to go up because all of the people involved in the price of land benefit from it going up, right? Because the only actor that would benefit from it staying low or going down were manufacturing companies, because they needed physically large amount of land to build a

factory. And so they were often the only strange bedfellow with workers who wanted cheap rents, right? And so it was quite often their employer and them that were both fighting for cheap rent and cheap land. And this effect is so important and so powerful that you can see its effects all around the world for better and worse, right? Red Vienna, the best cases of like democratic socialism in a municipality, Vienna, coming up as the greater Austrian national government is becoming increasingly fascist, right? They actually are able to do a lot for workers by saying like, hey, capitalists, we don't want you to leave because we want to tax you. But here's what we worked out is like, you will have to pay your workers less, or at least you're not going to have to keep paying

them more as prices go up, because we will build their housing. And we will offer them housing at deep discounts that only governments can do. And in exchange, you know, like your biggest cost, your labor force will be cheaper. And the way you pay for it is actually through a luxury tax. And we're going to tax how many servants you have and how many extra rooms you have past, you know, the ones that you need to survive it. And that worked out for the capitalist is actually cheaper. And it created a lot of really good housing that still exists today. And something like, you know, well over, I think, 60% or so of people in Vienna still today live in publicly run housing, or at least very strictly rent controlled. That's what we just see all over

the place is that it was only when manufacturing left that what replaced it was often finance, and what's called the fire industries, right? Finance, insurance, and real estate. And all of these industries replace the gross domestic product of manufacturing, and they actually want rents to go up. They want land prices to go up. And so the working classes have basically lost the only weird bedfellow, strange bedfellow that would help them keep land prices down. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. And it really does show how things are transforming. And so you kind of reoriented near the end that question to the question of labor and what happens to workers, right? And so I wanted to ask you about that as well, because early on, you talked about Amazon's customer obsession, and how I think many of these products are sold in a way that is focused on the consumer, and, you know, providing the consumer convenience and these new, you know, abilities to consume. But what does this transformation entail for workers? Because we're seeing that workers are becoming more precarious under this model.

You know, that's already happening right now and you would see it going even further. But in a piece I think published last year, Kevin Rogan also, when he looked at Sidewalk Toronto, he explained how in many cases, and I think you can see this far beyond that, that technologies are used not so much to always replace human labor, but to invisibilize it in certain senses. So you think that the technology can do a lot more than it actually can, because it actually relies on human labor that is just not as easy to see. And, you know, I think you describe that with how you think that this new model will still have, you know, poor people near rich people, but you won't see the poor people as much because it will exclude them, right?

So what do you think that, you know, if we're heading in this direction, that actually means for workers and for labor. Yeah, I think Jathan Sadowski called it Potemkin AI. These systems that, yeah, look like a computer is doing some sort of magical process when in fact, it's just like 1000 people in the Philippines that are doing it for you. So there's one thing right there, right? Is that, you know, globalization, something we haven't talked about yet, is a huge factor in this that you will see stuff that's very determinative of your quality of life being impacted by the immiserated labor of people that you've never met from somewhere else. It won't just be their

dead labor in objects that you use, like your phone made by someone at Foxconn factory in China. It'll now be, you know, someone determining whether or not you get to get into a building based on what someone in a call center determines about you or something like that, which is not to say that the people in the call center have power, right? They will make decisions through semi automated systems, but they don't have any control over you, really, they're just, you know, pressing buttons. So that's definitely a factor. And then there's also something I've been playing with recently is another really great

Marxist geographer, Sharon Zukin, has this great idea in her book, Loft Living. You know, she's looking at in the 80s, like, why did investment bankers fall in love with lofts in Soho? And she argues that it has something to do with the artistic mode of accumulation. And the idea is that societies model their accumulation strategies based on what the rich enjoy and want to emulate. And in the 80s, it was cocaine and art and wanting to invest money in things that, you know, no one else can get. In this case, it was art.

And you see this all over the place in the artifacts of the time. The movie Beetlejuice is these assholes from the city coming to this like sleepy, I think it's like Connecticut or something, town to do art, to have people enjoy art and invest in it and purchase it, right? And even in, you know, holidays are coming up, the National Lampoon Christmas Vacation, the neighbors are yuppies that want a quiet suburban existence and also enjoy like pretentious art. And so this figure of the person consuming art and hating people is very prominent. And it's for good reasons, because that was the dominant accumulation strategy at the

time, was that you take things that no one else can have, right? Because now we're sort of at peak mass production of goods, right? So now like Ahoy Palloy can have big screen television. So I can't signal my wealth through that. Instead, you have an American psycho talking about, you know, like how good George Harrison is or something while he's hacking people up, right? Because he can appreciate 80s yacht rock or whatever, right? Better than you can, because he spent more time just listening to it, imagining, you know, who he wants to kill next, right? All of these figures are about that artistic mode of production. Now we're entering into this, what I would argue would be like this convenience mode of production and the ability to like call things on demand through interfaces. And that's slowly becoming democratized where like now, you know, like I can request a car and a food or whatever, right? Groceries and prepared food. And that is

eventually, if it hasn't already, right, become the main accumulation strategy to suck up value and wealth through, again, labor-intensive programs that only redound to the benefit of a few. That's a great point. And it's almost like after being able to show their wealth through material possessions, we're going back to them kind of showing their wealth through the ability to have servants like do things for them in a way that other people can't. Right. episode and to think about where cities are going and how technologies are potentially going to make cities worse, more exclusive, more extractive in very many ways. But do you think there's an aspect of that that we haven't touched on that is really important for people to think about and consider as we move forward? Here's where I pitch my book. I'm writing a book about how not just the private sector, but the public sector as well, and increasingly the public sector, entices local governments to start acting like not only private actors, which they've been doing for a very long time, where now your city government

has to constantly be seeking profits and also wants to immiserate you because they're at the behest of large employers, right? Because they don't have any money. It's not only that, they're also starting to act like reality TV stars and Instagram influencers. They are required to be extra. They have to really tout the few competitive advantages that they have left, which are usually immaterial. It is the lifestyle that you can live in these places. It is the history embodied in whether it's like, you know, what they throw up on the wall on a cocktail bar, or, you know, like the founding myth of the city embodied in their farmer's market or

whatever, all these things that they have to show are valuable in some way. And I'm looking at here in upstate New York, where I live, it is the state government has actually started creating these competitions where you apply for what should be and what used to be block granted money, where you just, you know, cities are guaranteed this intergovernmental wealth transfer from taxes is now these competitive programs where like a city has to say like, ah, yes, our government services building will definitely celebrate the history and heritage of the Hudson Valley and the many fishers and canal workers that used to live here. And that's why we have a mural on it. Please give us $700,000. This is what you have to do now. And it's a lot like being an Instagram influencer, right? Where you're like, well, yes, I you have to do now. And it's a lot like being an Instagram influencer,

right? Where you're like, well, yes, I am a full person. But I am also a full person that really loves Mac lipstick. Like this is how Mac lipstick informs my identity. And cities now have to do that all over the place all the time. And what I see is really the only antidote. And this is how this is an answer to your question, right? Is like, the only way to do that is to just eliminate this game entirely, right? Is to no longer jump into the my city is special and unique because of this one history that it does or whatever. It can be and that's fine. But let's not peg $3.5 million on the fact that you used to manufacture shirt collars like they did here in Troy, home of the detachable shirt collar, really exciting. Like stop that. And instead say like, you know, what do we need now? What can be done that doesn't rely on far away venture capitalists pockets and start making things but also services and stuff

that actually creates and retains value locally. And it's not locally for the sake of the fetish of the local, right? Like, ooh, this handmade soap. But it's like, how long can we keep a dollar in this community before it flies out into Jeff Bezos's pocket? Like, how do we keep it? How do we physically keep a physical dollar, like a dollar bill here? And the way to do that is to do stuff like, I'm trying to come up with more examples. But so far, the one that I like the most is stuff like evergreen cooperatives that were sometimes called the Cleveland model because it was based in Cleveland, Ohio, where the city uses its bonding authority, its ability to access cheap capital to say, hey, education and medical facilities like, you know, Mercy Hospital or the Cleveland Clinic, right, was one that they went to. And they say, you need laundry services, right? You go to Aramark now or something. We want to start up a worker-owned

laundry facility. And we need their first big customer. And we'd like that to be you. So the city not only puts in the down payment, like puts up the initial cash, it also plays matchmaker to the new emerging firm and the existing firms that probably won't go anywhere. And then you put out an RFP to get, you know, like whatever physical plant needs to be built, built, and then hire people based on all sorts of things, whether it's, you know, like how long they've lived in the community, protected status, right, stuff like that. And then they're not just employees, they have to be employee owners, right? And so you don't just get like one person making the lion's share of the money.

You get like a dozen people making a fairly good living, doing something that needs to be done anyway, and isn't just like, you know, something where money flies out the door to Jeff Bezos's pocket, right? And it's this stuff that is deeply not sexy, right? Like laundry. That could really, really help. But it couldn't also be something that is more interesting, like, you know, cooperatively run groceries and restaurants. This can all happen. It's all very, very possible. The only thing that's really keeping us is one imagination,

political imagination of people that are in office right now at all levels, but also, you know, our own imaginations of what is possible. But then, of course, also, there's a lot of very material things like the fact that even well-intended liberal policies like black-owned businesses or something and giving priority to women-owned, minority-owned businesses don't have written in them, not all the time, but often, provisions for determining whether or not a company is minority or women owned if they are cooperatively owned. So we have to, you know, just like amend these things so that you know, like, okay, 51% of the cooperative owners are women, then this is a women owned

business or something like that. So those are the ways that so far I see of us getting out of this, this mess is, you know, you can't just like, find like the lift to the Uber, right? You know, something that's like marginally nicer to their employees or better or something like is, you know, you can't just like find like the lift to the Uber, right? You know, something that's like marginally nicer to their employees or better or something like that, you know, the target to Walmart and not that any of these things are actually better, but their marketing is better. We have to figure out just completely different ways to opt out of these immiseration systems. I think that's a fantastic point. And I feel like having the government actually going in and trying to make these changes is a really positive thing. And, you know, just to go back to what you were saying about kind of the competition between cities and things like

that, I feel like that was put on full display with like the Amazon HQ2 thing a couple years ago, you know, and we've been talking about Amazon a lot, but I feel like that's a really good example of it. Yeah, and it's an example. It's a well-seen one, but it is not the only one going on. That happens all the time at different scales. And it has been going on for a decade. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. David, it's been fantastic to speak with you to get your insight on these topics.

Thanks so much for taking the time. This has been a ton of fun. Thank you for having me. David Banks is a visiting assistant professor at the University at Albany and the editor at large at Real Life. He's also writing a book about how cities act like reality TV stars for the University of California Press. But unfortunately, it's still too early for you to go preorder it. You can follow David on Twitter at at DA underscore Banks. You can also follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, which is a group of left wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find out more information about that at

harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the show and make sure that these critical perspectives on technology are still getting out there, please go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. Thanks for listening.