6 ms·

I recently heard a comedian say "The Internet has flattened our culture" and that idea has really stuck with me. So similar to Lisbon "losing its essence" I wa

by Oarch 2y ago

I recently heard a comedian say "The Internet has flattened our culture" and that idea has really stuck with me. So similar to Lisbon "losing its essence" I was in Berlin recently and noticed many of the city's distinctive hallmarks had been internationalised/Millenialised away. The weird German toilets, the day drinking punks outside the rail stations, the ubiquitous graffiti and smell of beer (or urine). And the rental costs have shot up. Not to sound like I knew the city before it was cool, but the general flattening of cities into predictable, quality consumer products seems to be happening everywhere, not just Lisbon.

Rinzler89 2y ago
>but the general flattening of cities into predictable, quality consumer products seems to be happening everywhere, not just Lisbon. That's not the main problem. IMHO the bige one is that cities are no longer people's homes and hubs of culture, but have turned into highly efficient wealth extracting machines (from the tourists and immigrants, as well as from the locals) where the owning class try to extract as much money as possible from the have-nots, like you point out the rents shooting up. Once everything becomes about making as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else around me, where the locals don't work anymore to support local business in their community but work to help bulldoze piles of money into the hands of a few foreign multinational corporations with HQs in tax heavens, then things inevitably turn to shit: society becomes low-trust, people more divided, wealth inequality increases, crime increases, ghettoization, homelessness, political extremism, communities and family units breaking up, social services decaying, loneliness epidemic despite living in a large city, etc. And all these things can happen despite or maybe even because, an economy and GDP going up. This isn't something new either but has been going on for 20+ years AFAIK. Not sure how to fix this though since it seems like the effects caused by an unregulated globalization which seeks to MIN/MAX everything financially, creating huge gaps between the winners and the losers of the new order, both at national levels, and at individual level.
- truckerbill 2y ago
  The establishment left has been replaced with /was always aspiring-middle class monetarist spokesmen. Actual radical socialist policy needs to be normalized or we're heading for trouble
  - RandomLensman 2y ago
    The last time that was tried it ended with people a lot poorer and cities run down - why would you expect a different outcome now?
    - leansensei 2y ago
      It wasn't real socialism last time.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        And it won't be next time due to how humans (like many, many other animals) work.
        truckerbill 2y ago
        I guess the Danes are enlightened
        RandomLensman 2y ago
        The means of production are pretty privately owned in Denmark.
        Rinzler89 2y ago
        The point is the results of the worker's labor are more fairly shared in Denmark than in other places.
        2y ago
- m000 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Who's Maggie and Ron? You mean Thatcher and Reagan? What did they do?
    - not_the_fda 2y ago
      Privatization, Union-busting, cutting social services, trickle-down economics, increasing military budgets and foreign interventions.
    - m000 2y ago
      Among else, they championed deregulation and trickle-down economics (aka Reaganomics). In the discussed case, this translates to: We don't need a social housing policy because it "distorts" the market. And it doesn't matter that housing is turned into a money-making machine for the select few, because the wealth generated by tourism will eventually trickle down to society via the generated jobs.
  - betaby 2y ago
    Housing is more regulated then ever in developed countries. What are talking about?
    - m000 2y ago
      What are you talking about? The regulations I'm aware of regard mostly construction standards. Not what you can do with the property. Any restrictions for the use of a property typically come via your bank mortgage. I.e. if you are already rich enough, they won't apply to you.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(land_use) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(land_use) I assume pretty much all the other developed countries have analogues to zoning and setback laws and other regulations that dictate what can and cannot be built on a given piece of land. I have even seen regulations dictating what kind of facades (purely an aesthetic choice) buildings must have.
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  You fix this by for once focusing on local wealth creation not wealth extraction or abstract "growth".
- netbioserror 2y ago
  This is a remarkably reductive and unsophisticated take. Businesses acting "greedier" and rents shooting up has correlated very strongly with the DIRECT inputs of stock prices and property values; in other words, artificially low interest rates and artificially high liquidity. Naturally, these sorts of reality-warping forces will feed into a more hostile low-trust culture. You'd have to prove that there's something particularly special about urban decay as opposed to rural decay, and rural decay is a very strong force in the Western world. Where I am in the USA, rural properties and home prices are skyrocketing, the original communities are being hollowed out, old folks are dying to fentanyl while their grandchildren fly off to urban centers around the country, and investment firms gobble up huge amounts of land. It's just as greedy and unaffordable as the urban landscape. We have systemic changes with robust explanatory power, and I already gave two. People's character tends to reflect the environment they are trying to survive in; try not to look at people's behavior as a cause, but a symptom.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >Businesses acting "greedier" and rents shooting up has correlated very strongly with the DIRECT inputs of stock prices and property values; in other words, artificially low interest rates and artificially high liquidity. Naturally, these sorts of reality-warping forces will feed into a more hostile low-trust culture. I didn't claim otherwise. And I don't think you're contradicting me. I think your argument simply slides along with mine. And let's not pretend that only the big evil faceless banks and corporations are to blame for everything skyrocketing. Oh no, the average joe has also given into mass greed as well, who'd more likely rent out his inherited apartment to a tourist for 50 Euros/day than a local broke ass student for 500/month.
    - netbioserror 2y ago
      First of all, you blame peoples' behavior without searching for incentives and shaping forces. This is very "kids these days" argumentation, and specifically blaming greed or an increase in greed is downright utopian. Past ages and societies were no less full of greed, nor can future ages and societies be cleansed of greed. However, unless artificially warped by an outside influence, most social interactions and relationships tend towards cooperation as the best solution (see the Prisoner's Dilemma). Competition is a great example of an emergent interaction which incentivizes "altruism": Forcing prices down, encouraging resource efficiency, punishing waste and fraud. Second, your idea that our societies are suffering from deregulation is downright delusional. Artificially set interest rates and liquidity injections are the ultimate form of regulation, wherein governments actively decrease the entire population's time preference by inflating away their savings, impoverish everybody but the wealthy by boosting assets, and reduce competition by shoring up the biggest businesses to bloat up even bigger. Remove this ultimate regulation, and with the current conditions, markets would choose staggeringly high interest rates, forcing deflation and thus absolutely demolishing fast money, investment scamming, and real estate speculation overnight. So no, my line of argumentation does not slide into yours. You actually don't know what you're talking about and rely on appeals to fantastical sentiment.

by Oarch 2y ago

Rinzler89 2y ago

>but the general flattening of cities into predictable, quality consumer products seems to be happening everywhere, not just Lisbon. That's not the main problem. IMHO the bige one is that cities are no longer people's homes and hubs of culture, but have turned into highly efficient wealth extracting machines (from the tourists and immigrants, as well as from the locals) where the owning class try to extract as much money as possible from the have-nots, like you point out the rents shooting up. Once everything becomes about making as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else around me, where the locals don't work anymore to support local business in their community but work to help bulldoze piles of money into the hands of a few foreign multinational corporations with HQs in tax heavens, then things inevitably turn to shit: society becomes low-trust, people more divided, wealth inequality increases, crime increases, ghettoization, homelessness, political extremism, communities and family units breaking up, social services decaying, loneliness epidemic despite living in a large city, etc. And all these things can happen despite or maybe even because, an economy and GDP going up. This isn't something new either but has been going on for 20+ years AFAIK. Not sure how to fix this though since it seems like the effects caused by an unregulated globalization which seeks to MIN/MAX everything financially, creating huge gaps between the winners and the losers of the new order, both at national levels, and at individual level.

truckerbill 2y ago
The establishment left has been replaced with /was always aspiring-middle class monetarist spokesmen. Actual radical socialist policy needs to be normalized or we're heading for trouble
- RandomLensman 2y ago
  The last time that was tried it ended with people a lot poorer and cities run down - why would you expect a different outcome now?
  - leansensei 2y ago
    It wasn't real socialism last time.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      And it won't be next time due to how humans (like many, many other animals) work.
      - truckerbill 2y ago
        I guess the Danes are enlightened
        RandomLensman 2y ago
        The means of production are pretty privately owned in Denmark.
        Rinzler89 2y ago
        The point is the results of the worker's labor are more fairly shared in Denmark than in other places.
        2y ago
m000 2y ago
[flagged]
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Who's Maggie and Ron? You mean Thatcher and Reagan? What did they do?
  - not_the_fda 2y ago
    Privatization, Union-busting, cutting social services, trickle-down economics, increasing military budgets and foreign interventions.
  - m000 2y ago
    Among else, they championed deregulation and trickle-down economics (aka Reaganomics). In the discussed case, this translates to: We don't need a social housing policy because it "distorts" the market. And it doesn't matter that housing is turned into a money-making machine for the select few, because the wealth generated by tourism will eventually trickle down to society via the generated jobs.
- betaby 2y ago
  Housing is more regulated then ever in developed countries. What are talking about?
  - m000 2y ago
    What are you talking about? The regulations I'm aware of regard mostly construction standards. Not what you can do with the property. Any restrictions for the use of a property typically come via your bank mortgage. I.e. if you are already rich enough, they won't apply to you.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(land_use) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setback_(land_use) I assume pretty much all the other developed countries have analogues to zoning and setback laws and other regulations that dictate what can and cannot be built on a given piece of land. I have even seen regulations dictating what kind of facades (purely an aesthetic choice) buildings must have.
RandomLensman 2y ago
You fix this by for once focusing on local wealth creation not wealth extraction or abstract "growth".
netbioserror 2y ago
This is a remarkably reductive and unsophisticated take. Businesses acting "greedier" and rents shooting up has correlated very strongly with the DIRECT inputs of stock prices and property values; in other words, artificially low interest rates and artificially high liquidity. Naturally, these sorts of reality-warping forces will feed into a more hostile low-trust culture. You'd have to prove that there's something particularly special about urban decay as opposed to rural decay, and rural decay is a very strong force in the Western world. Where I am in the USA, rural properties and home prices are skyrocketing, the original communities are being hollowed out, old folks are dying to fentanyl while their grandchildren fly off to urban centers around the country, and investment firms gobble up huge amounts of land. It's just as greedy and unaffordable as the urban landscape. We have systemic changes with robust explanatory power, and I already gave two. People's character tends to reflect the environment they are trying to survive in; try not to look at people's behavior as a cause, but a symptom.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >Businesses acting "greedier" and rents shooting up has correlated very strongly with the DIRECT inputs of stock prices and property values; in other words, artificially low interest rates and artificially high liquidity. Naturally, these sorts of reality-warping forces will feed into a more hostile low-trust culture. I didn't claim otherwise. And I don't think you're contradicting me. I think your argument simply slides along with mine. And let's not pretend that only the big evil faceless banks and corporations are to blame for everything skyrocketing. Oh no, the average joe has also given into mass greed as well, who'd more likely rent out his inherited apartment to a tourist for 50 Euros/day than a local broke ass student for 500/month.
  - netbioserror 2y ago
    First of all, you blame peoples' behavior without searching for incentives and shaping forces. This is very "kids these days" argumentation, and specifically blaming greed or an increase in greed is downright utopian. Past ages and societies were no less full of greed, nor can future ages and societies be cleansed of greed. However, unless artificially warped by an outside influence, most social interactions and relationships tend towards cooperation as the best solution (see the Prisoner's Dilemma). Competition is a great example of an emergent interaction which incentivizes "altruism": Forcing prices down, encouraging resource efficiency, punishing waste and fraud. Second, your idea that our societies are suffering from deregulation is downright delusional. Artificially set interest rates and liquidity injections are the ultimate form of regulation, wherein governments actively decrease the entire population's time preference by inflating away their savings, impoverish everybody but the wealthy by boosting assets, and reduce competition by shoring up the biggest businesses to bloat up even bigger. Remove this ultimate regulation, and with the current conditions, markets would choose staggeringly high interest rates, forcing deflation and thus absolutely demolishing fast money, investment scamming, and real estate speculation overnight. So no, my line of argumentation does not slide into yours. You actually don't know what you're talking about and rely on appeals to fantastical sentiment.