Linkage

Recently declassified files show how the UK government covertly monitored Australian journalist John Pilger, and sought to discredit him by encouraging media contacts to attack him in the press.

Calgary's downtown development incentive program, which offers $75 per square foot to building owners willing to convert underused office space to residential apartments, is unique to North America.

It was launched in 2021, at a time when the city — home to more corporate head offices per capita than anywhere else in Canada — was reeling in the wake of an extended downturn in oil prices and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Commercial property values in the city's core had collapsed due to a wave of energy sector layoffs and consolidation that had left close to a third of Calgary's downtown office space empty.

Desperate to fill nearly 13.5 million square feet of unoccupied space and boost its dwindling tax base, Calgary launched the incentive program with the goal of removing six million square feet of empty offices from the city's downtown by 2031.

Sheryl McMullen, who manages the program for the City of Calgary, said it was unclear at the time what the reception would be.

But the program turned out to be so popular that in October 2023, the city was forced to press pause after reaching its $253-million funding threshold.

Capitalism relies on maintaining an artificial scarcity of essential goods and services (like housing, healthcare, transport, etc), through processes of enclosure and commodification. We know that enclosure enables monopolists to raise prices and maximize their profits (consider the rental market, the US healthcare system, or the British rail system). But it also has another effect. When essential goods are privatized and expensive, people need more income than they would otherwise require to access them. To get it they are compelled to increase their labour in capitalist markets, working to produce new things that may not be needed (with increased energy use, resource use, and ecological pressure) simply to access things that clearly are needed, and which are quite often already there.

Take housing, for example. If your rent goes up, you suddenly have to work more just to keep the same roof over your head.  At an economy-wide level, this dynamic means we need more aggregate production — more growth — in order to meet basic needs.  From the perspective of capital, this ensures a steady flow of labour for private firms, and maintains downward pressure on wages to facilitate capital accumulation. For the rest of us it means needless exploitation, insecurity, and ecological damage. Artificial scarcity also creates growth dependencies: because survival is mediated by prices and wages, when productivity improvements and recessions lead to unemployment people suffer loss of access to essential goods — even when the output of those goods is not affected — and growth is needed to create new jobs and resolve the social crisis.

There is a way out of this trap: by decommodifying essential goods and services, we can eliminate artificial scarcity and ensure public abundance, de-link human well-being from growth, and reduce growthist pressures.

The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

The SimCity series has achieved the universal success few games do, with a veneer of realism that draws gaming and non-gaming fans alike. But just what is SimCity's model based on? And what politics are hidden inside the black box driving the simulation?

A few years ago, I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail. I asked him why he would willingly give Google copies of all his email. Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use Gmail, Google has your email anyway. Any time I email somebody who uses Gmail — and anytime they email me — Google has that email.

Since our conversation, I have often wondered just how much of my email Google really has. This weekend, I wrote a small program to go through all the email I have kept in my personal inbox since April 2004 (when Gmail was started) to find out.

Somerville, Massachusetts, is a thriving city. It has, in spades, the attributes that the median city planner and real estate professional alike will tell you are in great demand and short supply in 2020s America: walkability, vibrancy, sense of place. Adjacent to central Boston, Somerville is known for top-tier educational institutions, a robust arts and culture scene, and lively civic squares surrounded by locally owned shops and restaurants.

Unsurprisingly, the city’s attractive lifestyle comes at a price. As of this writing, there are dozens of homes for sale in Somerville listed for over one million dollars.

Such a price ought to be a clear signal that there is ample market demand for a place like Somerville. According to economic theory, developers should respond by building more housing in Somerville, and by creating more blocks and neighborhoods that resemble the most in-demand parts of Somerville.

There is only one problem: they largely can’t. In 2015, Somerville’s city planners undertook a study to find out which of the city’s existing residential properties conformed to Somerville’s own zoning code. The number of fully zoning-compliant lots in the city of 80,000 people was a surprise to everyone: there were only 22.

The city of Somerville, it turned out, had declared itself illegal.

On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.

“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?

“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”

RealPage software is used to set rental prices on 4.5 million housing units in the U.S. A series of lawsuits allege that a group of landlords are sharing sensitive data with RealPage, which then artificially inflates rents. The complaints surface as housing supply in the U.S. lags behind demand. Some of the defendant landlords report high occupancy within their buildings, alongside strong jobs growth in their operating regions and slow home construction.

In subsequent days, journalists at the scene in Israel continued to investigate the validity of the beheaded babies story. A French journalist in Kfar Aza reported that nobody had mentioned beheaded children to him.

Meanwhile, Oren Ziv, a prominent Israeli journalist, highlighted he had not seen any evidence to support the claims before adding that Israeli soldiers and the army’s spokesperson remained unable to confirm the allegations.

The White House quickly walked back on Biden’s earlier claim. It reiterated he had not in fact seen evidence of the beheaded babies he was convinced of less than 36 hours ago, making clear that the president’s comments were merely repeating Israeli news reports and officials.

However, there was little detectable appetite from the British media to change tack and report on this clarification in the ongoing story.

In fact, the newspapers had moved on completely. The zealous willingness to examine in scrupulous detail atrocities taking place on the ground and describing in vivid terms the violent acts, spectacularly disappeared.

Nor was there a lack of information to report on. By the time one week had passed since 7 October, more than 2,000 Palestinians had been murdered by Israel’s relentless military bombardment. At least 720 of them were children and around 450 were women.