TRASHFUTURE - De-Trash Rock City ft. Jonn Elledge

Episode Date: March 9, 2018

Join Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@milo_edwards), and Alex (@alexkealy), as we sit down with Jonn Elledge (@JonnElledge) - editor of the City Metric section at the New Statesman to talk about the roots of the housing crisis and why urban privatisation is categorially cruel and stupid. At least after we bloviate about politics for like 15 minutes.  Riley takes a bold stand against imperialism. Milo is accidentally knowledgable about classic leftist literature. Alex has a run in with Michael Gove. Jonn chornicles his journey left. Follow us @trashfuturepod xoxo Riley

Before, I do, I did something to come up on my Twitter feed today, a quote from an article in the Wall Street Journal, 25% of my life have been working for Walmart, he said. I just wanted something that kind of showed where I had been in what I'd done in my life. Like pulling an all-nighter at the office, a company tattoo can signify devotion in a way that impresses colleagues and breeds trust with clients. Holy shit. Hitman style. That's so good.

Like you grow up like a Shaolin monk in the like Walmart training facility with your bread, like you have no parents, like you have no purpose but to serve number 47. It's the only way that we can compete with robots is because we have like soft, tattooable skin. You know, it's like this is, what this says to me, the practice of getting a company logo tattooed on you is basically like the last ditch effort of trying to save your relationship by having a kid or getting your like partner's name tattooed on you. There's actually another way we can compete with robots, which is that we are dumber than them. I think I might have said this before, but I'll say it again.

Like whenever people are like, oh yeah, you know when robots are super intelligent and they can do everything we can do, but better, we can just give them all of the menial jobs and we'll just chill out and it's like, but any robot that's like much more intelligent than us is not going to want to do those menial. Do you not think that laziness is a function of it? The robot's going to be like, no, I'm not doing this. This like sweaty man is telling me to like count. I'm not going to count that.

No, fuck you. I can destroy you with my bare hands. That's not an outcome that will happen. Well, yeah, this man with a Walmart tattoo all over his face and neck is... Eating sausage, mash and gravy on the pier in Benidorm. What's the Walmart code for how many? Cause how many if you kill, is that he's killed six people for each paddle round? What is that?

It's a Vori something, right? But it's also, I mean, it's the, it's like the Gladwellian 10,000 hours thing. So is he completed being Walmart now? He's now a tier one Walmart operator. I want to see this guy in a job interview for like Target or something. Like, is this going to actually hold him back? Like, do you need to plan to have another tattoo over your existing tattoo? Do you need adaptable tattoo?

It's like, it's like the show tattoo fixers becomes the job center. Double agent. It's going to be like scalp badges where you just collect them. Walmart? Well, I know that's German for the bar at thee. No, it's Walmart. I've Dutch ancestry, you see. The German Voldemort who just kills Harry Potter in bookworms.

He's much more organized. The German Voldemort who just kills small business in your town. Yeah. Come on. That's actually slightly clever. Did the Germans hate small business? Well, no, Walmart does. Oh, right. Yeah.

Right. The only evidence I could find for the Germans hating small businesses was crystal nuts, which I mean, admittedly is a pretty egregious example. But it's, it's quite specific. I think there were a lot of other factors at play. Strong joke. I think there may have been racial element. On that bombshell, it's time to announce that this is once again an episode because

we just keep doing this of trash future. The podcast for how the future is still trash. It's bad folks. It's bad. It will be bad. Gary Cohn's leaving the White House. Stormy Daniels is going to send out the Trump dick pics that she has. And Mick Mulvaney basically said, huh, I couldn't believe that was I would have been so happy

working with a quote globalist. It was, it's been fucking mental. A Mohammed bin Salman is in London right now and there's a million like cars driving around with let look like lap dancing ads for how much like the UK is just desperate to just have him shower us in money in exchange for, you know, turning Yemen into a bay. It's, it's all, it's all strange folks. Oh God, is that where there are all those ads with the Saudi and British black for Saudi airlines that say United Kingdoms with like an S drawn in red on the end.

And so with our city going completely fucking insane, we've decided to invite John Ellige, the editor of the city metric imprint of this new statesman, right? It is. Yeah. No, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is the, this is like, it's a little warm in here. It's the meltiest podcast we've ever done. Oh, we got that quickly.

I thought you guys had been like nice for like 20 minutes and then going for the kill. I thought this would be, I've been for a succession of labels in the last few years. I've been a melt. I've been a centrist. I've been a liberal. I've been a social Democrat. I've been a Blair. I didn't know it was any of these things.

I'm not conscious of having like shifted my position at any point these days. I'm a fellow traveler because like I was quite pleased that Labor did well last year. So a lot, a lot of the sort of Twitter centrist ads now think I'm the enemy. So basically everyone hates me. It's good. Yeah. That's why we've invited you on here. Of course.

It's really, it's the like, it's the blue labor that just wants to elect Anna Subri, the head of the labor party. Oh, it's amazing how many new names you have to learn every week, isn't it? In British politics because they just get discredited every day. There's particularly in the Tories is like, I, I'm predicting this now that like the foreign office is going to be headed by a literal 12 year old within a year. Foreign office is headed by a metaphorical. Yeah, we'll go from metaphorical to literal.

This is what we were talking about earlier actually before you guys showed up is that this whole, the whole political era we're in is just this metaphor is gone. Everything is super literal. And you know, there's and like, I love your occasional like mummish giggle. Yeah. So you, so instead of labeling the old, your foreign secretary is like a child. You just have a child like a child. Yeah.

Like no, it's going to be an essay contest of year sevens to like, you know, why has Britain the best country in the world? And then someone's going to say, because we actually invented democracy for Africa and don't look earlier than that. And you know, there's only just talks about gravy for like a page and a half. There's not your gravy stain at the end. And Theresa May will be like, good enough. They've not said anything outright Nazi.

This is, this is a genuine problem. I think if you look at this at the Boris Johnson's and Michael Goves of the world, it's like they're trying to govern for the medium of the 700 words, thundering column. And I've written dozens and dozens of 700 word columns. I've found if you go up to a thousand words, you need to have a second thought. You need to kind of like develop things. I do not feel confident that based on my column writing experience,

I could run a fucking country. But these guys have somehow got it into their head that being able to like stain an argument for 700 words is enough to actually come up with foreign policy. I could totally run a country based on just my podcasting experience. I, you know, I think because I realized like I could intervene, for example, on a transport policy because I could just send out a tweet that says stop inventing a fucking bus and it'll every single time get thousands of retweets for some reason.

Riley spent a lot of time alone with his column. So, so, so, John, is this actually the problem that most journalists aren't as self-deprecating as you and that thus enough people in the media have gone? Well, yes, it must be enough experience to run a country. Otherwise, our jobs are meaningless. Is that what, is that what, like, like, if more, if more of your colleagues said that rather than, yeah. I mean, I don't mean it's quite that, but I think there is definitely a thing where

like Boris was built in large part because he had friends in the media. Right. He was kind of a popular guy with a lot of the editors and columnists. And the same with Gover. Gover's Boll accounts, I've never met the guy, but Gover's Boll accounts very nice and very popular at the time. It was very popular news editor. So just because people liked the guy, they were well-disposed towards him.

And when he moved into politics, they were more likely to write nice things about him. And it's sort of like, it's sort of the opposite of an atom in him attack. They're kind of, they're judging him because it's like, well, Mike was a nice fella. You must know where he's up to. So, like, people who come up for the media kind of, yeah, there is this sort of weird effect. The other thing I think is that it's quite, if you find the light, if you keep pressing a particular button, people like cheer you and give you a round of applause. It's really sort of difficult to stop pressing that button,

which is how you end up writing the same thing over and over again. They've like, you just know you can get applause on the internet. And I think it's the same thing. Like they've had that effect. Only they've graduated to doing it in rooms for activists and then, you know, going on television. It's full of dozens. Yeah. It's full of upwards of a dozen activists.

Youth movement's getting, you know, the tour youth movement's getting launched what today, isn't it? So, very exciting. It's every day. There's a new tour youth movement and centrist party. Oh God. I think everyone just loves Michael Gove because they trust that he's got enough like acorns in his cheeks to last the winter. He actually does look like a sort of Archie, Archie Andrews puppet of himself, doesn't he? I just have this really clear mental image of a squirrel with Michael Gove's head.

What's the magic thing that's ever happened to me? The invasive American Gove squirrel. Science gone too far. What I think is really funny is that like when Michael Gove is talking, you can see Sarah Vine drinking a glass of water. Like how's she doing that? Oh God. Fuck me.

When Sarah Vine writes articles in defense of Michael Gove as though she's not his literal wife, it's like everyone knows you're his wife. Like just stay away from the topic of Michael Gove. Like you can't like credibly write a column like in defense of my husband, in defense of Toby Young by Toby Young byline Toby Young. It's the raw sexual charisma of Michael Gove. I was sitting next to him at a football game recently and there are so many things to unpack there.

You were at a football game. The football game is probably the headline. Michael Gove at a football game. Secondly, a football game with some sort of undefined relative child, relative boy about 12. And I found that the vow I bane myself, a clone myself in June 2016 that I would scream at either him or Boris Johnson if meeting them in the flesh sort of collapsed in a large public space

that I think all I did was when coming back late from halftime we had to squeeze. I just squeezed past him. I just went sorry. That was like my level of commitment. I should have said I'm very sorry. That is true. That is true.

I didn't express enough. You didn't even clarify what you were sorry for. Exactly. You know, it's that Dr Frankenstein was the scientist. Alex Keely was the monster. Oh, wow. I just have no courage. We have some great city related content to get into with John

because he knows all about cities and smart cities. It is slagging them off with us, which is going to be great. Before we do that, I do kind of want to quickly touch on that on the controversy of the fact that the snowflakes are taking over the Frankenstein story and trying to repurpose it that Frankenstein was just a misunderstood outcast. Isn't that an outrageous rewriting of history? I don't know what a good way into this is. I feel like John's revelations about it are great.

I don't know if we want to start with that or if we want to just rip on it first. Let's start with that. We'll get into the ripping later. As I understand it from a friend in the Sun Newsroom, they knew exactly what they were doing. They were like, oh, let's put this out. This will really wind up the left. And then they start winding on the internet.

They're like, everyone's being mean to them. Despite the fact this is exactly what they were trying to do. I don't get the logic there. I love the Sun Newsroom. The left is interchangeable with people who read books. I think it's time to talk cities because the two cities that I have grown up in and been alive in, I've been alive in other cities just not for any sort of comparable length of time.

This sentence really got away from you. Actually, as you've fumbled over that sentence, before we get into the proper topic of cities, can I just give a quick shout out to City of the Week, Salisbury in Wiltshire, where the most interesting thing to ever happen in Salisbury, probably since the English Civil War, has happened when a Russian defector was murdered, presumably by the FSB, by poisoning in our shitty knot Azizi.

I think this is just the most 2018 thing that's ever happened because even apparent deep state clandestine assassinations are taking place in the most boring place imaginable. The FSB got one of those voucher codes, buy one main course, get one half price, and they were like, it's a very good deal. We may as well kill him here. They knew that's where he'd be because he couldn't resist a bargain. The polonium thing was also, was it in Itzu?

Yeah. I was slightly nervous to get in the wrong chain and getting you guys a cease and desist notice. But I'm pretty sure it was like a central London Itzu. That would be hilarious. It turned out that it was like, Wasabi and then Itzu came out like, No, Itzu has always been firmly against

Russian deep state assassinations, unlike Wasabi, where they take place on the fucking reg. Don't, don't sue us. Please don't, please don't kill us with polonium. Please don't bomb us. Vladimir Putin, stand up guy. Really great chest. I can't deny that. So far, I'm going to say don't, don't bomb us.

Mohammed bin Salman, please don't, sorry, don't try to bomb us and end up bombing the Royal London Hospital. Please Itzu and Wasabi and Zizi don't sue us for saying that Russian assassinations have taken place in you. Russia, please don't deep, deep state assassinate us. Tesco, please don't tattoo us. I'm good. Michael Gove, please don't.

Please don't. Please don't stop. Oh no, no, it's Asda who will tattoo you, because they're owned by Walmart. I couldn't have been more polite, Mr. Gove, when we... Mr. Gove. The Honourable, the Right Honourable, if he's capped, I can't remember what.

Sir Gove. Anyway, this is, this has been stupid. Why don't we go to any number of places, including Granary Square, Canary Wharf, or other similar pseudo public space. Please take the autonomy away from me and give it someone more intelligent. So we've been talking a little bit about,

like, why London kind of sucks increasingly in recent years, why it's become kind of a weird neon daycare. And John, I think as sort of the, through what you talk about in City Metric, about everything from building policy to, like, this profusion of what you might call pseudo public spaces. I think you can shed some light on kind of why things have been going downhill.

Well, the short version is we're fucked. I just needed that. A little bit comes down to, I mean, two things. Firstly, it's council budgets have been slashed to pieces, so, like, the actual democratic organisations cannot... They lack both the power and the resources to kind of shape a place in the way they once had. If I can just quickly pop in,

what is a pseudo public space? Okay, so Canary Wharf is a classic example. That's been, like, the Thatcher Government's plan for Canary Wharf was basically, it was going to be, like, low-rise industrial stuff, but a bunch of banks came in and basically, like... The banks in the city at the time were looking for places to put bigger trading floors,

and it was quite difficult to do that in the city of London itself, so one of them, I forget which, decided, hey, why don't we just do it? Why don't we build a new skyscraper on the Isle of Dogs where there's all this empty space? A lot of dogs. So instead of this low-rise industrial state,

you basically got, like, this is a mini Singapore. But despite the fact that it has, you know, streets and pavements and looks like public space, it's all a private state. It has private security guards wandering around. It's all owned by the Canary Wharf Company. So, I mean, pseudo-public space, but there's a very long-winded answer

without many jokes in it. Sorry, but pseudo-public space is stuff that looks like, you know, Trafalgar Square or something. It looks like a public space, same as any other, but it's owned by a private company, and they can enforce their own rules there. And so, I mean, for example, if you tried to go be...

I'm going to edit out all the throat clearing. If you tried to go be homeless in Canary Wharf or Granary Square or Bishop Square or Paternoster Square, any of these places. You know, a weekend. Yeah. Well, if you were a rough sleeper and you walked into one of these places, what would happen?

I mean, they'd move you on. I mean, that's actually not as big a deal as it sounds like, because councils will also move you on these days. No, yeah, fair enough. It's not like, you know, actual public space is often any more welcoming these days. But yeah, a private company can basically just say, you know, get off our land.

And there's no kind of legal recourse there. It's their land. They can tell people to leave. So... And there have been a lot of these increasing, I mean, not just in London, but particularly in London recently. And you were saying it's because of council budgets in many ways.

Yeah. I mean, I think that is a big factor. You know, it's harder for councils to regenerate their own space because they don't necessarily have the capital to do it. So we increasingly see them teaming up with big private property developers to work in these grand master plans. So like, you guys may have spoken about this in a podcast before, because it's been such a big story the last year or so,

but the Haringey Development Vehicle was meant to be one of those where it was Haringey Council teaming up with land lease, the Australian developer, and basically joint venture, they hand over a bunch of their land to this joint venture, which is a co-owned 50-50 public private, and that would redevelop it and build new homes and new retail space and so on,

but would have had to kick a bunch of people with you there out. And the reason there was a lot of noise in that story about... I'm not making many jokes again, am I? Sorry. No, that's fine. There was a lot of noise in that story about it being another front in Labour's forever war between there's a Blairites and the Corbynites. But I never entirely bought that

because I think a lot of it was just like the council needed to build homes, it needed to redevelop stuff, and it was not going to be able to do that on its own dime. It needed to team up with a private developer to do it. That's not to say it was the right choice. It might have been a terrible choice, because these deals do have a history

of screwing over existing tenants, but nonetheless, I kind of see how councils get there for reasons other than ideology. It's not one of those superhero crossover films that everyone seems to love these days. It's like all your favourite counsellors are these Australian property developers teaming up to take on the scourge of insufficient housing.

Teaming up to fight the poor. Right, so it's actually because they're only team up because the Avengers budget have been slashed and they can't do it on their own require. So actually, ideally the Avengers would do it on their own, but they've had to mothball Iron Man a Thor and they have to team up with someone. Thor has a terrible heroin addiction, he's really in no shape.

And Tony Stark lost all his money in a pyramid scheme. They have to get in Batman, who is a billionaire investor. That's the wrong franchise. You've just switched from Marvel to DC. But it's a crossover, it's a crossover, I did say that. We're going to get added to it. I love making nerds angry. Well, it's a group of people I've never respected.

To clarify, you made a correct pluralisation of octopus bit earlier, so I don't know at what level you don't think you're a nerd. The thing that... How did we get here from initially private property developers again? Because I'm derailing the important points. One loose analogy about private public partnerships

and whoosh, the podcast has been derailed like putting a penny on a train track. I think I almost sort of disagree. I think it is an ideological choice. It's an ideological choice that was made to starve councils of enough money to make there be social housing. It's upriver from...

I don't know the guys involved. There may very well be people involved in it at Haringey who are ideological about it. But I'm saying I can totally see people getting there for reasons other than thinking, hey, business is great, let's screw it. Because they don't have any other option. And then, of course, momentum comes in

and very ominously votes. This is it. We had the exact same bullshit from the other side. People were saying, oh, well, it's only because momentum infiltrates. When there have been development schemes like this, tenants have been shafted. You don't have to be a car-carrying member of momentum

to be a bit suspicious if a private developer wants to knock down your home and promises you'll get a new one in three years' time. That's not a weird response. This is what that is. It's like everyone who's mad... All the clericobers of the world who are super mad about HDV being canceled.

It's like they met Lyle Landley from the Monorail episode of The Simpsons and they're like, no, make us Brock Wayne, Huckdonville, and North Averbrook. We want to be on the map like them. Among the other subjects I have bought on about professionally, I used to write about NHS finance. So this is really going to kill the audience.

It used to be that basically NHS funding was a black box. We just chucked money at hospitals and they did some stuff with it. Sometimes they complained there wasn't enough money, but they were really paying attention to what happened with it. In the 90s, governments thought, hey, we don't know what's happening with public money here. What we need is more cost accounting. We need to market structures to kind of induce efficiency.

But at that point, you kind of need to build these massive layers of management to monitor where the money's going and to monitor the internal market. Then you get 10 years down the line and you get old people really annoyed about the amount the NHS is now spending on management rather than healthcare. Because of all these structures they've introduced to kind of monitor what's happening to them,

the NHS cannot win. Yeah, it's like really aggro means testing for benefits. It's like, OK, all of our benefits means testing has saved us £3.50 and we've spent £1 billion on means testing all these people. I for one can't wait until you have to sing the national anthem to get your benefits and you have to also sing it in Cornish. The national anthem, which by that point will be done with the sickness. No, that's only if Brendan O'Neill wins.

If we win and we can make Ash Sarkar Prime Minister, then it's definitely still going to be wearing my Rolex. Did you say that tweet from a labour Brighton counsellor the other day complaining that his six-year-old daughter had never sung the national anthem at school and so he didn't know the words? What? I went to quite a weird Ponzi school.

I did not think there was a single time we ever sung the national anthem. It is not a thing that people have ever done in schools. I went to a private school. It was really wanky. We used to sing Jerusalem on the reg and we literally never sang Jerusalem, which is like much more right-wing than the actual national anthem. We never sang the national anthem. The national anthem was to, you know,

oh, it's for everyone as opposed to, you know, just certain people. It's like interesting when people complain about my child doesn't know the words, the national anthem, because of this school. And it's like, well, if you love the national anthem that much, you could have taught your child the words. How much do you really love the national anthem? I don't know why I said that particularly to you, Alex.

I'm just super ambivalent about it. How much do you love the national anthem? No one knows the words to the second verse. The fucking queen doesn't know them. People only know the first verse. So I am going to just, I'm going to seize control of the podcast again and slightly get back to it.

The means of podcast. I'm going to seize control of the means of podcast. I own the mixer. I own what comes out of the mixer. That's not, that's fine. It's like inventing the flame in hot Cheeto again. Everything I say on this podcast is your property. Yes, exactly. And I can edit it to make you sound like you're admitting

to touching someone's can. Like in rock bottom. Make it sound like you were making jokes about crystal knots. Trouble it. But I do want to sort of get back to this idea of the pseudo public space. Now it comes into existence

and there's been this, this sort of, this almost this trade off, right? Where we were sort of the public sector with its sort of, with its sort of push from the neoliberals to sort of reduce, reduce spending to sort of at the benefit of private companies

just creates these incentives for them to come in and largely just snap it up. You're sort of the tenant of the Kuwaiti sovereign wealth fund and you have to obey the Kuwaiti sovereign wealth funds rules when you're going to be near, I think, the Battersea power station?

I thought it was the Qataris. The Qataris own much of the riverfront which we don't really talk about very much. But yeah, there's it's also, I don't know how universal it is. There has been this sort of weird divergence in the city's fortunes the last

20 years or so. Like there's a certain inflection point in the 90s where suddenly like people used to like want the big house on the suburb and the car and so on. And there's a point in the 90s where suddenly living in cities becomes fashionable and it becomes aspirational to be living in

a flat in central London or something. So suddenly certain cities like London and New York and Toronto and San Francisco, it becomes incredibly fashionable for companies and people to be based in the centre so land prices go through the roof. Meanwhile, there's vast numbers of other cities

that would kind of kill for this problem because they've got fucking nothing going on. They would love it if like more Qatari wealth funds were to come in and regenerate Wolverhampton for this. So yeah, there's kind of two classes of cities. A lot of what we think of as

these kind of urban problems of the private space and the public space, I think is kind of specific to this kind of particular class of cities. No, definitely, yeah. The winner take all city, right? Well, it's the... I think that's right, it's only... It's one thing I sort of recall, right?

I don't just see this in terms of places like Granary Square where, you know, in exchange for allowing a company to have a small fiefdom in your town, you sort of you get like, you know, a pretty square with a couple of high-end chain restaurants. Qatari sovereign wealth fund in their hundreds courts.

Where you also, if you see this in the sort of the councils continue to make these deals with builders. So for example, I think one Black Friars, right? That's the building that looks sort of like a pregnant vase, right? A pregnant vase? Yeah, like when you... At this point, there was a pregnant vase.

It's like when you jack off into a vase to make the flowers brighter. I'm not a biologist, so... I just can't confirm. Only if they're carnivorous ones. Alex really intently in that point. He was the guy. And the podcast...

That is actually the point which for... My traditional means of killing flowers is just neglect, not insufficient dragging off. That's my usual route. If you're a moderate Republican, the point at which the seaman hits the water in which the flowers are, that is the beginning of life.

When I was thinking of that vase building, as part of its deal with the council, right? They had to build an air... Because they were taking over so much public space around themselves. The deal was they were going to have to build and open to the public viewing gallery at the top.

But they said it was only economical to do so if they could charge 25 pounds a ticket to go into the public viewing gallery. And the council just sort of rolled over and kind of accepted it. What is that smell? Is it bullshit? I think it might be

complete and utter bullshit. But it is kind of... It is sort of ridiculous that we're kind of like trying to persuade private companies to do this stuff. Wouldn't it be much easier just to, you know, fucking tax them? That would simplify things.

If we had, you know, some kind of property tax. We didn't need to try and bully them into providing two social homes on the top floor or something. No, no, no, because everyone should get some fucking money out of it and build some homes elsewhere. The problem there, John, though, is that then they'd all move to some

place like the Netherlands, and then all these Dutch people would be getting the amazing benefit of paying 25 pounds to look out this like sterilized fucking landscape. You say this, but like the Netherlands is pretty flat. So actually... There are not many viewing platforms there now.

So they would probably actually benefit from that. Actually, that's like... Can you spin your chair around, do some straight talk for teens with us? Because this is something I see all the time. Young person reference. I want you to wrap through us like Edward James almost, who's going to keep us from joining a gang.

It's a young person reference to like old person stuff. It's like a cool geography teacher thing, like seeing backwards on the chair. Can we buy my first name? Can you be that? Can you speak on this for a moment? I see constantly that private development do agree

to provide sort of like affordable homes, because the affordable homes are always judged... But the affordable homes always seem to still be like a one bed flat for like, you know, 750,000 pounds. There's like multiple layers of bullshit here. So firstly,

affordable home was redefined a few years ago to mean... Well, it can mean 80% of market rent. Which, if you've looked at London rents recently, you'll notice that that's not that affordable. And also in a couple of years, like what was previously not affordable is now considered affordable,

because the market rent, which is just mental. It's not tied to wages, which it clearly should be. The other thing was the camera and government loosened the rules so that like you could do, I think, help to buy was like one of the options you had, where it's like, you know, basically cheap flats for sale,

as opposed to social housing. So you could kind of meet your section 106 commitments that way, by basically propping up a terrible camera near a policy. But it's a stupid system. Like we kind of, like we've stopped building social homes, the state has stopped building them,

but they just kind of beg developers to do it. Developers will come up with like any means they can to get out of this commitment, because it's just like, because they can, because they can afford better lawyers, because there are going to be consultants out there who will take money from them to find the best way of helping them

wriggle out of these commitments. That is genuinely the entire type of business. It's just these consultancies that help people get out of building the social homes that they are contractually obliged to do. And the state doesn't have the kind of lawyers that can compete with that, because it has no fucking money.

So this is, this is a Harlem Globetrotters situation, where it's just the, the battle between the state and developers, not battle, battle, is just, it's like a game where like Harold Lefty-Williams or Meadowlark Lemon comes out and like brings a stepladder onto the basketball court, and the Washington

Generals are just there with their pants falling down, you know, so they can be just humiliated by the Harlem Globetrotters. That's exactly what this is. The state's being the Washington Generals. They're losing cartoonishly on purpose. But it's basically always the case in these matters where it involves lawyers,

because private companies are always better at this. Like, so I have a May... So they pay better, so the expertise will flow from public to private. People will like learn how this stuff works on the state's dime, and then take a job working for like a contracting company for like double their salary, because you would, wouldn't you?

Yeah. The state can't hang on to its expertise. I have a May who works in some kind of tax consultancy at Deloitte, and he's not even high up at all, and he has to like phone up HMRC basically like 20 times a day every day, and he's like, I have never had a conversation with anyone

at HMRC who knows approachingly as much as I do about tax, and I've only been doing this for two years. Which is like a worrying state of affairs, considering I don't really trust the motives of Deloitte really. Particularly.

Equally, I can't say I trust the motives of landlies trying to read, trying to sort of, you know, evict everyone in herring gay so they can accommodate more management consultants buying their first home. I don't also don't trust the Canary Wharf group

who currently, who already is like made it, like you can't protest in Canary Wharf. You remember in Occupy in 2011 the owners of Pattern Oster Square, another similar pseudo public space, what they just did was they filled it with these iron railings

so that the only way to get into Goldman Sachs was like to go into a labyrinth that was unfortunately free of a minotaur of any kind. And that you couldn't possibly go and do anything except walk into Goldman Sachs

because when this land is privatized then it is fundamentally controlled. So they're saying this open space is only for conveyance to Goldman Sachs. Just like the fucking like the people who own the sky garden in the city can say, ah yes

this open space is only for people who pay 15 pounds and can book two hours and oh and here I'm also going to sell you a drink as opposed to just a place you can just go and sit down and you know, dog. I am quite in favour of making Goldman Sachs investment bankers walk for a maze to get to work

every day. That sounds amazing. They privatize our land and they build a fucking privatized labyrinth on it but who pays for the magic little ball of yarn, the taxpayer. We're going heavy Greek in this episode. Hell yeah. Excuse me while I

pedarast. There's no, there are no young boys in the room. I should just terrify that for the listeners. It's a joke. Every time I think you've hit bottom, it's like it's not that bad. Well, that's the whole thing with pedarasty actually. Every time

I see a laugh of 60% distress your name has already been associated with this and we're also going to make it clear that you own a denim puffer jacket. Yeah, I own a denim puffer jacket and

the arms detach and sometimes it becomes a glee. So you're in no position to object. Oh no. Yeah, exactly. If anything, you're the monster. Well, let's not go. No, I don't. I don't accept that. I don't accept that given some of the things that Mario

said this episode. I'm a worst second worst person on this episode. I'll take that lovingly. There's something quite Soviet Union about a denim puffer jacket. Like so many things. It's like where they've kind of like seen some western fashions and sort of cobbled them together into a kind of like, yes, puffer jackets

denim is very good and it's like, has anyone ever worn this? I don't know. I just Yes, movie star James Dean wear this all the time. Like if James Dean and the notorious B.I.G had a love child Oh, good.

It would probably wear a denim puffer jacket. But just moving us on ever, ever so gently and slightly, there is another kind of company that is that is privatizing land and this is where East India Company Well, they did do a lot of that

and I'm going to go hot take unlike the new foreign secretary the year seven who wrote that essay on why Britain invented democracy for the rest of the world and that's why it's great and gravy. I'm going to say it was bad it was bad folks East India Company

I'm going out on a limb here I knew you guys were radical left but this is that's over the line Well, I love is that the East India Company was bad even by its own objective because it literally had to be bailed out by the British army. I was like not even good at being the East India Company

even if you accept its own moral like compass Milo Edwards quoting J.A. Hobson imperialism a study. Hello I wrote that book It's difficult though with the East India Company because obviously as as the bad guys in the parts of the Caribbean series of course given Johnny Depp's

recent sort of track record it then you know the pirates were bad as well So are you saying imperialism actually good this is just made me think now that like maybe the imperialists were the original male feminists because it's a bunch

of men right with like it's sort of suspiciously right wing objectives but which they're covering up by like going like these men are treating these women unshiverously allow me to throw my fedora into the ring Milo Edwards now quoting Gayatri Spivek can the subaltern speak you're

accidentally quoting a lot like just making a lot of left of like left-wing classic points and we know it's accidental because we've met me but I want to I want to talk about the other kinds of companies that are going in privatizing city space and I'm assuming

they're doing it out of the goodness of their hearts because they want to provide people with like lovely shit to look at it and affordable places to live and that is the new phenomenon of the smart city and it's happening in it's proposed to be happening in Toronto I believe

I mean the problem with the term smart city is it kind of gets attached to like any old bollocks that involves a city and like a computer at some point so I know that sounds like I'm taking the piss but genuinely it is everything from like this stuff where you kind of have these completely sort of automated

cities to like someone with like with an app it all gets bundled together as a brand name so if you look if you think about like what like Apple or Google or Facebook or Amazon have done where kind of these companies got immensely rich through basically owning a part

of the kind of operating system of modern life and a lot of the big tech firms think there is an opportunity to do something similar by basically owning the operating system for the city so if you're kind of like in charge of like you know streetlights and the energy

grid and the transport system there's probably a way of monetizing that somewhere so there's currently all these big tech companies storming around this stuff like looking for a way of actually making money and there's one recent example that happened and this

way of bringing up Toronto sidewalk other than because represent yeah of course you know six God other than the sidewalk is or as we call it in Britain pavement is thank you thank you very much as we call it in East India Company whatever

I'd rather a pity I'd rather one pity laugh for an episode than like seven crones you know what fuck you I resigned from this podcast so sidewalk which is owned by alphabet which owns Google is basically

in talks to purchase a giant chunk of Toronto and what they've said is that they are going to do do something to it in addition to create their new headquarters there presumably massively subsidized by public money which of course we do because they create jobs that doesn't cost us anything

they say what they're going to do is they say sidewalks urban platform concept integrates digital physical and standards layers to form the baseline conditions for urban innovations and a pavement and urban

platform isn't that what that is and that they are actively developing a digital layer with four essential components and this is the one I want to talk about a sense component knits together distributed network of sensors to collect real-time data about the surrounding environment

enabling people to measure understand and improve it and an account put component provides a highly secure personalized portal through which residents can access public and private services and

basically what's happened what they're doing to explain this is they're making a city that is built almost entirely of sensors so they'll know everything going on all the time and he looked from public service to private service and from private service to public service and he could no longer tell the difference

between the two it was like that bit in the dark night where he turns all the phones and then Morgan Freeman goes this is awesome we should use this the whole time and that's how the film ends oh yeah yeah there are no problems with this

I watched the Dark Knight recently which is why I've appreciated that it's quite a niche fit of the Dark Knight where Batman uses highly invasive surveillance technology to track down the Joker I just I just I just love that

they're basically that this is once again Silicon Valley doing something taking just I was saying because they're saying basically we're going to use this to deliver city services to residents like garbage collection and street lights and stuff as though cities haven't

been doing that there's this sort of weird thing where the tech boom has led everyone to kind of fetishise the idea of tech as if it doesn't just mean like stuff that is quite new like you know once upon a time cities would run their own

energy systems you know the power systems they'd run their own transport and so on and that was kind of quite high tech for the time this is just like that but there's an app involved and a lot more words like that you just read out that whole extract and it's like most of those words are completely unnecessary

they're just saying we would like to run the street lights, collect some data and you'll be able to access it on the internet in some way it's like you really didn't need all that bollocks about a sense layer but they have to put that in because otherwise they don't think they can get funding you know OK so here's the radical thing in the smart city OK

there's not going to be buses anymore no buses gone, buses are for your dad what we're going to have is a sort of large vehicle that picks people up from places where people tend to be and takes them to places where people tend to go what are you going to call this incredible invention

I'm going to call it boost but actually there's going to be no you so it's just going to be BS so it's boost, it's short for boost because it gives you a boost oh god so I don't know

so all this always seems to be that like there was that David Graber a few years ago where like he was basically a rule yes and he was saying that there's basically if you look at like a lot of this tech stuff doesn't a lot of the technology is not as radical and

transcendental as like the shift in tech from say 1900 to 1950 is much less significant than the shifts from say 1960 to 2010 the material change to our life it would be more disorientating to be teleported from 1900 to 1950 then it would be 1950 to 2000

and a lot of all this seems to be very not very radical changes but they have to like dress it up as some sort of smart city when it's just putting just getting it, collecting information a bit more quickly yeah I mean I think the big data stuff

is real and new and if used correctly probably could like help us in terms of like you know planning transport networks or where we need new infrastructure or like most energy efficient use of the street lighting that one so there's stuff you can do there but like a load of other bullshit gets piled on top of it

in an attempt to make it sound a lot more like I kind of think like the fact we will carry smartphones on which we can kind of instantly plan our journeys and call cabs and get food delivered to us that is a much bigger change in terms of how we kind of interact with an urban space than any of this nonsense

but that's kind of quite bottom up and it's much harder for big tech firms to come in and try and own that because apart from anything else like Google and Apple have kind of cornered the network on that one well it's the essentially what I think the thing to think about

here is like that this digital layer through sensors is just going to be gathering every single bit of data it possibly can and according to Sidewalk Labs it's saying it will provide a single unified source of information about what is going on and a centralized platform for managing it

and but what that reminds me of it reminds me of why the West Virginia teachers are striking in West Virginia in the States the teachers are striking because there is a new provision in their contract where their new insurance plan mandates that they have to wear a fit

bit and they have to log certain You are shitting me. I am not shitting you Welcome to the hell world in which we live so right so they had to wear a fit bit they had to sort of log a certain amount of activity all the time or else they wouldn't get covered for their insurance and so what it says here is like look

kitchen appliances and I am reading now an article in city lab that you sent that we sort of were talking about earlier right where you know if it's in theory if you have kitchen appliances that are switched on too long overflowing trash bins and so on and other sort of little bits of sort of social minor social malpractice

addressed by this digital layer then it's Google that gets to decide what's bad and it's Google that gets to decide maybe it's time for you to get downgraded into an into a house because your social credit score is not high enough just like it would be in West Virginia your insurance company

could decide to deny you coverage because you weren't walking seven miles to school every day. A group of men in boiler suits knock at your door. Matt, I think you know why we are here like no please no. You have infringed the rule on living on the capital too long three times now you must be sent away for reeducation

but that's the thing with these pseudo public spaces pseudo public spaces because pseudo public is basically a misnomer like they're private they're just not excluded but they're still private and they can do what they want I mean I kind of think

there are two different layers to this that are potentially frightening depending on how you're feeling about it firstly the data collection stuff is possibly frightening in and of itself but then there's the kind of the lack of democratic oversight the fact it is private companies that have this

rather than the state now there are plenty of times in history where the state having enormous amounts of data had consequences that were not entirely positive just think of China's social credit score a normal thing

oh you know crystal knocked also a misuse of big data in its way but yeah so I think it's kind of doubly sort of terrifying

the upsetting thing here is that it's quite difficult to know what we do to stop Google if it stops being benign I mean there's like big evil tech companies go Google has not been the most frightening of them so far but there's definitely the potential for it to like

literally have us all killed I know all these people who are like lefties and whatever and generally skeptical of like the way things are going but who like have like more than one Alexa in their house and I'm like they're definitely spying on you stop saying they're leftists, they're probably liberals

they might be liberals did you see the stories today that like Alexis have started like randomly cackling yeah we worked because if you were the programmer responsible you would definitely do that wouldn't you and you would leave it for like a year or so to activate

so that it just looks around you don't do it on an unwrapping day but now it's like oh is there a wizard in the system somewhere you just like occasionally blurts out like beginning phase two the other day I was hanging out with a friend

who has an Alexa and just out of nowhere the Alexa just went here are some facts about Rhode Island and I was like what the Alexa is now a man on Twitter and it heard you say something about Rhode Island actually so

the other thing so there is like not much we can do to stop there is that worry there isn't much we can do to stop a company like Google and I feel that links to like a bunch of other things so like Theresa May with that speech she did in front of

the bricks didn't she sort of roughly go we'll rely on we'll rely on the duty we'll rely on the public sense of duty of the developer do your duty and build houses and there's no use of laws there's no use of laws or power or money to like make these large

organisations comply there's some diffuse hope that they'll do the right thing she was complaining about the fact that they would pay bonuses based on their profitability rather than the number of homes they build and all the big volume house builders that wasn't literally how shareholder capitalism was supposed to work

they do not answer to you I really like the bit of the speech in front of the bricks where she was like oh so guys how about that airplane food huh like that stuff shit look at this guy he's laughing my man my man laughing he laughing because he know and then the slap base at the end

I was going to say thank you Nick Mullen wow where did you come from oh that's not accurate no you'd be Adam Friedling so I'm going back to the sidewalk Toronto thing I think following on from what sort of Theresa May says about how they're going to they must do their duty

to provide these affordable housing or whatever you can see these development companies will sort of use any language they can to get out of doing that whether that's just using lawyers or like we're saying like fucking these buildings do or whatever

or in this case they'll say a drawing on its long history developing affordable housing in New York City the sidewalk team will pursue innovative financing approaches in Keyside an innovative financing approach something it's always necessary to create a social good pay with

your organs yeah sometimes it's innovative sometimes the best fit will be a partial homeownership program other cases may require a rental subsidy critically affordable housing in K and Keyside will not be relegated to separate buildings but and so in it says

that sidewalks approach will be for residential facilities to the neighborhood to house residents with a range of incomes so in my mind is still stucking on like pay with your organs and I just went to this horrible place where you can like sell your organs but then lease them back remortgage your organs

podcast to go pitch black mirror you actually have to like tender out to private companies for your organs because they might be able to do it cheaper and more efficiently than your current organs but right in this case it's saying you know it's in large companies if they can't fight

to not give out affordable housing we'll innovate to not give out affordable housing yeah I love the term range of incomes as well because that's like literally any two numbers which are different are range it can be like a range of incomes from like a million pounds a year to one point two million pounds

a year one of my favorite things in like London property advertising is when they say you know prices start at like six hundred thousand or something it's like that's where they start yeah that's like a room cupboard what message do you think you are sending

it's like an upright coffin that you can sleep in oh my god I saw an apartment for rent so I'm currently flat hunting in Moscow again and I saw an apartment for rent that is literally less wide than this table and it has like like a single bed in it

like a very narrow single bed it's like a room for rent right like not actually an apartment was it and then that's just it there's like you like open the door and there's like maybe like two feet of space and then there's like this single bed that you can lie on and that's it and I was like wow even by Russian standards it was like

did you see the one that was going around Twitter today where someone's literally put a bunk bed above a bath thousand pounds a month and then you're like then you're like oh swimming pool in the basement that's statically quirky I am legend themed

apartment I'd love that you get to live in a dunk tank dude I just want John to rant about the pipe the pipe dream the pipe dream house what's that so this is the

that article's very funny the problem is not the idea and then of itself although it is horrific it's basically like I can't remember if it's Hong Kong or Tokyo it was like one of the big Asian cities where space is at a premium even compared to London someone has come up with this solution

sort of infill structures where it's basically like these sort of it's concrete pipes you can turn into rooms but it's sort of modular right you can build like the advantage if you've got a tiny gap between a building you can like put in free storage of these things and you've got like free flats

and it's like living in the international space station but like the thing that pissed me off is like the Daily Mail published this under the headline is this the solution to the housing crisis to which the answer is very clearly no no it's like they all want to

encourage us to live like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and get used to living in pipes do you want to live in the literal sewer when I'm in when I'm in rooms in my house I often think these straight walls are frustratingly lacking in curvature for me to sub-optimally

use my already limited space I'm very into like evil-can-evil style motorbike tricks it's actually it's actually the thing that pissed me off most is like circular pipes don't even tessellate so much wasted space

so like like hexagons and although there's one thing we've learnt from the Daily Mail sidebar of shame is that those guys are all about laying pipe so you know I assume that article was there for the same reason the Frankenstein was I assume they were going for hate traffic

obviously I have never done in my life of course you never but that's the thing is I think that's what you have to go back to right when Google says they're going to cater to a range of incomes they haven't necessarily said they're going to comply with building codes

and you know even if those building codes exist now it'd be very easy for them to lobby to get them suspended so they can experiment with a bold new method for affordable housing which involves getting all the poor people to live in a sewer so we can act out HG while it's the time machine

or the episode of Future Armour where they go down to the sewer people and they're treated like royalty because they're from the above place yeah the mutants they sort of became mutants because they were living in the sewer didn't they

I'm not sure what the exact genesis of this is we all need to know what does Daniel Hanan think about smart cities so one other sort of I'm thumbing through the I really regret that column a lot of the time now there was just a period of my life where

that guy couldn't fucking fart without four people sending me DMs about it sorry I just needed going back to the sort of Sidewalk RFP here's another sort of thing that Google is going to invent for us in Keyside

Sidewalk will pilot a neighbourhood assistant tool to facilitate social cooperation and public feedback the tool will enable Keyside residents to form new neighbourhood groups, crowdsourced community needs and access a peer-to-peer marketplace is it Robocop? no it's just they've just invented civil society

holy shit that's like a usenet group or something it's a bulletin board we've had those before it's crazy so basically in exchange for everyone's like cattle usage being monitored

it's a bulletin board and in exchange for experimental new housing programs for low income people that involve them either living in the sewers or time sharing a tent on a roof we're going to just give Google or Amazon

or whoever the fuck a giant slice of our city to basically do with what they want so I think a lot of this comes down to the problem that land prices in those superstar cities we talked about earlier have gone through the roof partly that's because

globalization means there's now a lot more economic activity flowing through London or New York than it used to be and part of it is just that interest rates have been so low for 10 years that everyone's piled money into real estate because it's a reasonably safe place to make it so until interest rates got to like 5%

or something I don't think we can tell how bad the housing crisis actually is in cities like London or New York or San Francisco so yeah I think this is another reason it's become very very difficult to build like social housing in places like London because it's so

land is so fucking expensive here so councils which have like a statutory duty to kind of make the most out of their assets it's kind of easier to balance their budgets if they're like selling them off or like doing joint ventures or something rather than like using a

big asset of theirs to just stick some homes for poor people on you don't really make much money out of that so I for one can't wait for Amazon to tattoo a tracker bracelet onto my arm so that it can make sure that I'm cooking right

you only get up to 10,000 hours worth of work at Amazon it can track how well what my heart rate is when I'm doing my evil carnival loop-de-loops in my tube house oh good alright guys I think we've been recording for a while and

we're getting super bleak John thank you very much oh and also before we go I did promise friend of the show Grace Blakely who is a researcher at the IPPR that I would sort of alert our listeners

to her new article which is her new study which has just been just been published today when this comes out by the IPPR on bringing in new taxes to curb avoidance by multinationals I've gotten the advanced press copy because someone mistook us for an important press outlet

ooh but I strongly urge everyone to go over and read it and as ever our theme song is here we go by Jin Sang you can find it on Spotify it's very good nice I enjoyed getting bleak with the boys getting bleak with the boys

alright you know Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was 20 fuck that's the bleakest thing that's the most depressing thing on the podcast you know Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein once again to malign scientists with her cry bully tactics yeah whereas this is an anti Frankenstein's

monster podcast alright thanks for being here and good night everybody you you you you