Got called a NIMBY by someone because I support a statewide ban on data centers. They said that would just push them into more vulnerable places that don’t have protections, as if this state doesn’t have vulnerable places that need to be protected. They said data centers were “inevitable.” It’s just such a bullshit take. Data centers are not housing, they are not necessary. A NIMBY will say “that should be built but not here.” I don’t want data centers to be built at all. A NIMBY is denying the construction of something that benefits people worse off than themselves. I’m opposing the building of something that only stands to benefit the most wealthy in the world. Don’t try to make this some sort of environmental justice issue and claim we should suffer because others refuse to protect their environment. Also, for the record, I would burn the rest of the country to ashes for the west coast lol.
i absolutely hate how much people in our society tolerate a certain type of "performative leftism" in which people use progressive buzzwords and ways of framing statements to advance right-wing viewpoints.
Like when you start talking about environmental issues and climate change, people try to shut down your argument with "but poor people can't afford..."
You try talking about reforming or gutting a deeply racist and classist "school choice" system, people try to defend the system by cherry picking one odd charter or magnet school that happens to serve a mostly-black population.
Sometimes people's arguments don't even make sense. For example my area has a dire housing shortage right now, and both the price of renting and buying a home has become astronomical, an an area that was cheap to live in until about 5-10 years ago. But if you ask them why they oppose new housing developments that would add more apartments or townhouses, in higher-density development, to increase supply, they say "because prices are too high and we need more affordable housing". So they end up voting for blocking any sort of housing development, or they only allow low-density luxury housing, and either outcome is one that is exactly opposite to the effect that the "objectors" say it will have.
So much progress is held back because people don't actually listen to and think about (and pick apart) the content of what people are saying. They get tricked or fooled by the superficial way in which the response is framed.
If someone frames the objection to a progressive policy in terms of "but this would hurt marginalized people", a lot of people will give in to the objection and back down with their level of passion or enthusiasm for their original point.
We can't keep doing this because if we do this it allows people to grind progress to a halt.
We need to engage with what people are actually saying, deeply, and when people's argument is bullshit, we need to respond by becoming 10 times as strong behind our original point. We need to take 80% of that effort and dedicate it towards patient, respectful education and explanation of why the response is wrong and the other 20% towards pushing for the original thing.
Yes, there will be some times when people have a valid objection, like something REALLY WILL hurt marginalized people and it's a bad idea because of it. And this is yet another reason why it's important to delve deeply into objections.
Some objections are more valid than others. The valid objections need to be considered and sometimes our goals need to be changed or even abandoned. But when the only objections are just repackaged or reframed old right-wing bullshit like racism or classism or NIMBYism, we really need to put our foot down and stamp that shit out.
If I haven’t convinced you yet of my point of view, this surely will: as a middle-class white Christian man who came of age during the most profound and sustained economic boom in our nation’s history, I understand struggle. I never received anything in my life, except a world-class public education that cost virtually nothing. I wasn’t handed anything, except two loving parents, a comfortable upbringing, and the general feeling that our nation’s institutions and structures were designed for the success of people like me.
So when the city council talks about poverty, when it talks about affordable housing, when it talks about Medicaid, what we’re really talking about is work ethic. What we’re talking about is a culture of give-me give-me give-me that, yes, I directly benefited from via the university I attended, but now that I’ve benefitted from public programs, I don’t want anyone else to benefit from them. The question is not, “How can we help other people?” The question is, “How can other people help themselves via policies that rely on magical thinking?”
"Every NIMBY’s Speech at a Public Hearing" (McSweeney's)
Sure, sometimes it really does make sense to do your own research. There's times when you really do need to take personal responsibility for the way things are going. But there's limits. We live in a highly technical world, in which hundreds of esoteric, potentially lethal factors impinge on your life every day.
You can't "do your own research" to figure out whether all that stuff is safe and sound. Sure, you might be able to figure out whether a contractor's assurances about a new steel joist for your ceiling are credible, but after you do that, are you also going to independently audit the software in your car's antilock brakes?
How about the nutritional claims on your food and the sanitary conditions in the industrial kitchen it came out of? If those turn out to be inadequate, are you going to be able to validate the medical advice you get in the ER when you show up at 3AM with cholera? While you're trying to figure out the #HIPAAWaiver they stuck in your hand on the way in?
40 years ago, Ronald Reagan declared war on "the administrative state," and "government bureaucrats" have been the favored bogeyman of the American right ever since. Even if Steve Bannon hasn't managed to get you to froth about the "Deep State," there's a good chance that you've griped about red tape from time to time.
Not without reason, mind you. The fact that the government can make good rules doesn't mean it will. When we redid our kitchen this year, the city inspector added a bunch of arbitrary electrical outlets to the contractor's plans in places where neither we, nor any future owner, will every need them.
But the answer to bad regulation isn't no regulation. During the same kitchen reno, our contractor discovered that at some earlier time, someone had installed our kitchen windows without the accompanying vapor-barriers. In the decades since, the entire structure of our kitchen walls had rotted out. Not only was the entire front of our house one good earthquake away from collapsing – there were two half rotted verticals supporting the whole thing – but replacing the rotted walls added more than $10k to the project.
In other words, the problem isn't too much regulation, it's the wrong regulation. I want our city inspectors to make sure that contractors install vapor barriers, but to not demand superfluous electrical outlets.
Which raises the question: where do regulations come from? How do we get them right?
Regulation is, first and foremost, a truth-seeking exercise. There will never be one obvious answer to any sufficiently technical question. "Should this window have a vapor barrier?" is actually a complex question, needing to account for different window designs, different kinds of barriers, etc.
To make a regulation, regulators ask experts to weigh in. At the federal level, expert agencies like the DoT or the FCC or HHS will hold a "Notice of Inquiry," which is a way to say, "Hey, should we do something about this? If so, what should we do?"
Anyone can weigh in on these: independent technical experts, academics, large companies, lobbyists, industry associations, members of the public, hobbyist groups, and swivel-eyed loons. This produces a record from which the regulator crafts a draft regulation, which is published in something called a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking."
The NPRM process looks a lot like the NOI process: the regulator publishes the rule, the public weighs in for a couple of rounds of comments, and the regulator then makes the rule (this is the federal process; state regulation and local ordinances vary, but they follow a similar template of collecting info, making a proposal, collecting feedback and finalizing the proposal).
These truth-seeking exercises need good input. Even very competent regulators won't know everything, and even the strongest theoretical foundation needs some evidence from the field. It's one thing to say, "Here's how your antilock braking software should work," but you also need to hear from mechanics who service cars, manufacturers, infosec specialists and drivers.
These people will disagree with each other, for good reasons and for bad ones. Some will be sincere but wrong. Some will want to make sure that their products or services are required – or that their competitors' products and services are prohibited.
It's the regulator's job to sort through these claims. But they don't have to go it alone: in an ideal world, the wrong people will be corrected by other parties in the docket, who will back up their claims with evidence.
So when the FCC proposes a Net Neutrality rule, the monopoly telcos and cable operators will pile in and insist that this is technically impossible, that there is no way to operate a functional ISP if the network management can't discriminate against traffic that is less profitable to the carrier. Now, this unity of perspective might reflect a bedrock truth ("Net Neutrality can't work") or a monopolists' convenient lie ("Net Neutrality is less profitable for us").
In a competitive market, there'd be lots of counterclaims with evidence from rivals: "Of course Net Neutrality is feasible, and here are our server logs to prove it!" But in a monopolized markets, those counterclaims come from micro-scale ISPs, or academics, or activists, or subscribers. These counterclaims are easy to dismiss ("what do you know about supporting 100 million users?"). That's doubly true when the regulator is motivated to give the monopolists what they want – either because they are hoping for a job in the industry after they quit government service, or because they came out of industry and plan to go back to it.
To make things worse, when an industry is heavily concentrated, it's easy for members of the ruling cartel – and their backers in government – to claim that the only people who truly understand the industry are its top insiders. Seen in that light, putting an industry veteran in charge of the industry's regulator isn't corrupt – it's sensible.
All of this leads to regulatory capture – when a regulator starts defending an industry from the public interest, instead of defending the public from the industry. The term "regulatory capture" has a checkered history. It comes out of a bizarre, far-right Chicago School ideology called "Public Choice Theory," whose goal is to eliminate regulation, not fix it.
In Public Choice Theory, the biggest companies in an industry have the strongest interest in capturing the regulator, and they will work harder – and have more resources – than anyone else, be they members of the public, workers, or smaller rivals. This inevitably leads to capture, where the state becomes an arm of the dominant companies, wielded by them to prevent competition:
This is regulatory nihilism. It supposes that the only reason you weren't killed by your dinner, or your antilock brakes, or your collapsing roof, is that you just got lucky – and not because we have actual, good, sound regulations that use evidence to protect us from the endless lethal risks we face. These nihilists suppose that making good regulation is either a myth – like ancient Egyptian sorcery – or a lost art – like the secret to embalming Pharaohs.
But it's clearly possible to make good regulations – especially if you don't allow companies to form monopolies or cartels. What's more, failing to make public regulations isn't the same as getting rid of regulation. In the absence of public regulation, we get private regulation, run by companies themselves.
Think of Amazon. For decades, the DoJ and FTC sat idly by while Amazon assembled and fortified its monopoly. Today, Amazon is the de facto e-commerce regulator. The company charges its independent sellers 45-51% in junk fees to sell on the platform, including $31b/year in "advertising" to determine who gets top billing in your searches. Vendors raise their Amazon prices in order to stay profitable in the face of these massive fees, and if they don't raise their prices at every other store and site, Amazon downranks them to oblivion, putting them out of business.
This is the crux of the FTC's case against Amazon: that they are picking winners and setting prices across the entire economy, including at every other retailer:
The same is true for Google/Facebook, who decide which news and views you encounter; for Apple/Google, who decide which apps you can use, and so on. The choice is never "government regulation" or "no regulation" – it's always "government regulation" or "corporate regulation." You either live by rules made in public by democratically accountable bureaucrats, or rules made in private by shareholder-accountable executives.
You just can't solve this by "voting with your wallet." Think about the problem of robocalls. Nobody likes these spam calls, and worse, they're a vector for all kinds of fraud. Robocalls are mostly a problem with federation. The phone system is a network-of-networks, and your carrier is interconnected with carriers all over the world, sometimes through intermediaries that make it hard to know which network a call originates on.
Some of these carriers are spam-friendly. They make money by selling access to spammers and scammers. Others don't like spam, but they have lax or inadequate security measures to prevent robocalls. Others will simply be targets of opportunity: so large and well-resourced that they are irresistible to bad actors, who continuously probe their defenses and exploit overlooked flaws, which are quickly patched.
To stem the robocall tide, your phone company will have to block calls from bad actors, put sloppy or lazy carriers on notice to shape up or face blocks, and also tell the difference between good companies and bad ones.
There's no way you can figure this out on your own. How can you know whether your carrier is doing a good job at this? And even if your carrier wants to do this, only the largest, most powerful companies can manage it. Rogue carriers won't give a damn if some tiny micro-phone-company threatens them with a block if they don't shape up.
This is something that a large, powerful government agency is best suited to addressing. And thankfully, we have such an agency. Two years ago, the FCC demanded that phone companies submit plans for "robocall mitigation." Now, it's taking action:
Specifically, the FCC has identified carriers – in the US and abroad – with deficient plans. Some of these plans are very deficient. National Cloud Communications of Texas sent the FCC a Windows Printer Test Page. Evernex (Pakistan) sent the FCC its "taxpayer profile inquiry" from a Pakistani state website. Viettel (Vietnam) sent in a slide presentation entitled "Making Smart Cities Vision a Reality." Canada's Humbolt VoIP sent an "indiscernible object." DomainerSuite submitted a blank sheet of paper scrawled with the word "NOTHING."
The FCC has now notified these carriers – and others with less egregious but still deficient submissions – that they have 14 days to fix this or they'll be cut off from the US telephone network.
This is a problem you don't fix with your wallet, but with your ballot. Effective, public-interest-motivated FCC regulators are a political choice. Trump appointed the cartoonishly evil Ajit Pai to run the FCC, and he oversaw a program of neglect and malice. Pai – a former Verizon lawyer – dismantled Net Neutrality after receiving millions of obviously fraudulent comments from stolen identities, lying about it, and then obstructing the NY Attorney General's investigation into the matter:
The Biden administration has a much better FCC – though not as good as it could be, thanks to Biden hanging Gigi Sohn out to dry in the face of a homophobic smear campaign that ultimately led one of the best qualified nominees for FCC commissioner to walk away from the process:
Notwithstanding the tragic loss of Sohn's leadership in this vital agency, Biden's FCC – and its action on robocalls – illustrates the value of elections won with ballots, not wallets.
Self-regulation without state regulation inevitably devolves into farce. We're a quarter of a century into the commercial internet and the US still doesn't have a modern federal privacy law. The closest we've come is a disclosure rule, where companies can make up any policy they want, provided they describe it to you.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out how to cheat on this regulation. It's so simple, even a Meta lawyer can figure it out – which is why the Meta Quest VR headset has a privacy policy isn't merely awful, but long.
It will take you five hours to read the whole document and discover how badly you're being screwed. Go ahead, "do your own research":
The answer to bad regulation is good regulation, and the answer to incompetent regulators is competent ones. As Michael Lewis's Fifth Risk (published after Trump filled the administrative agencies with bootlickers, sociopaths and crooks) documented, these jobs demand competence:
For example, Lewis describes how a Washington State nuclear waste facility created as part of the Manhattan Project endangers the Columbia River, the source of 8 million Americans' drinking water. The nuclear waste cleanup is projected to take 100 years and cost 100 billion dollars. With stakes that high, we need competent bureaucrats overseeing the job.
The hacky conservative jokes comparing every government agency to the DMV are not descriptive so much as prescriptive. By slashing funding, imposing miserable working conditions, and demonizing the people who show up for work anyway, neoliberals have chased away many good people, and hamstrung those who stayed.
One of the most inspiring parts of the Biden administration is the large number of extremely competent, extremely principled agency personnel he appointed, and the speed and competence they've brought to their roles, to the great benefit of the American public:
But leaders can only do so much – they also need staff. 40 years of attacks on US state capacity has left the administrative state in tatters, stretched paper-thin. In an excellent article, Noah Smith describes how a starveling American bureaucracy costs the American public a fortune:
Even stripped of people and expertise, the US government still needs to get stuff done, so it outsources to nonprofits and consultancies. These are the source of much of the expense and delay in public projects. Take NYC's Second Avenue subway, a notoriously overbudget and late subway extension – "the most expensive mile of subway ever built." Consultants amounted to 20% of its costs, double what France or Italy would have spent. The MTA used to employ 1,600 project managers. Now it has 124 of them, overseeing $20b worth of projects. They hand that money to consultants, and even if they have the expertise to oversee the consultants' spending, they are stretched too thin to do a good job of it:
When a public agency lacks competence, it ends up costing the public more. States with highly expert Departments of Transport order better projects, which need fewer changes, which adds up to massive costs savings and superior roads:
Other gaps in US regulation are plugged by nonprofits and citizen groups. Environmental rules like NEPA rely on the public to identify and object to environmental risks in public projects, from solar plants to new apartment complexes. NEPA and its state equivalents empower private actors to sue developers to block projects, even if they satisfy all environmental regulations, leading to years of expensive delay.
The answer to this isn't to dismantle environmental regulations – it's to create a robust expert bureaucracy that can enforce them instead of relying on NIMBYs. This is called "ministerial approval" – when skilled government workers oversee environmental compliance. Predictably, NIMBYs hate ministerial approval.
Which is not to say that there aren't problems with trusting public enforcers to ensure that big companies are following the law. Regulatory capture is real, and the more concentrated an industry is, the greater the risk of capture. We are living in a moment of shocking market concentration, thanks to 40 years of under-regulation:
Remember that five-hour privacy policy for a Meta VR headset? One answer to these eye-glazing garbage novellas presented as "privacy policies" is to simply ban certain privacy-invading activities. That way, you can skip the policy, knowing that clicking "I agree" won't expose you to undue risk.
This is the approach that Bennett Cyphers and I argue for in our EFF white-paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly":
After all, even the companies that claim to be good for privacy aren't actually very good for privacy. Apple blocked Facebook from spying on iPhone owners, then sneakily turned on their own mass surveillance system, and lied about it:
But as the European experiment with the GDPR has shown, public administrators can't be trusted to have the final word on privacy, because of regulatory capture. Big Tech companies like Google, Apple and Facebook pretend to be headquartered in corporate crime havens like Ireland and Luxembourg, where the regulators decline to enforce the law:
It's only because of the GPDR has a private right of action – the right of individuals to sue to enforce their rights – that we're finally seeing the beginning of the end of commercial surveillance in Europe:
It's true that NIMBYs can abuse private rights of action, bringing bad faith cases to slow or halt good projects. But just as the answer to bad regulations is good ones, so too is the answer to bad private rights of action good ones. SLAPP laws have shown us how to balance vexatious litigation with the public interest:
https://www.rcfp.org/resources/anti-slapp-laws/
We must get over our reflexive cynicism towards public administration. In my book The Internet Con, I lay out a set of public policy proposals for dismantling Big Tech and putting users back in charge of their digital lives:
The most common objection I've heard since publishing the book is, "Sure, Big Tech has enshittified everything great about the internet, but how can we trust the government to fix it?"
We've been conditioned to think that lawmakers are too old, too calcified and too corrupt, to grasp the technical nuances required to regulate the internet. But just because Congress isn't made up of computer scientists, it doesn't mean that they can't pass good laws relating to computers. Congress isn't full of microbiologists, but we still manage to have safe drinking water (most of the time).
You can't just "do the research" or "vote with your wallet" to fix the internet. Bad laws – like the DMCA, which bans most kinds of reverse engineering – can land you in prison just for reconfiguring your own devices to serve you, rather than the shareholders of the companies that made them. You can't fix that yourself – you need a responsive, good, expert, capable government to fix it.
We can have that kind of government. It'll take some doing, because these questions are intrinsically hard to get right even without monopolies trying to capture their regulators. Even a president as flawed as Biden can be pushed into nominating good administrative personnel and taking decisive, progressive action:
Biden may not be doing enough to suit your taste. I'm certainly furious with aspects of his presidency. The point isn't to lionize Biden – it's to point out that even very flawed leaders can be pushed into producing benefit for the American people. Think of how much more we can get if we don't give up on politics but instead demand even better leaders.
My next novel is The Lost Cause, coming out on November 14. It's about a generation of people who've grown up under good government – a historically unprecedented presidency that has passed the laws and made the policies we'll need to save our species and planet from the climate emergency:
The action opens after the pendulum has swung back, with a new far-right presidency and an insurgency led by white nationalist militias and their offshore backers – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaires.
In the book, these forces figure out how to turn good regulations against the people they were meant to help. They file hundreds of simultaneous environmental challenges to refugee housing projects across the country, blocking the infill building that is providing homes for the people whose homes have been burned up in wildfires, washed away in floods, or rendered uninhabitable by drought.
I don't want to spoil the book here, but it shows how the protagonists pursue a multipronged defense, mixing direct action, civil disobedience, mass protest, court challenges and political pressure to fight back. What they don't do is give up on state capacity. When the state is corrupted by wreckers, they claw back control, rather than giving up on the idea of a competent and benevolent public system.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Recently, I came across an instrument company called AeroBand that makes wireless MIDI ‘air drums’ with a sort of haptic feedback response, marketed as ‘silent’ drums, and the concept stuck with me for a while. The purpose of these ‘drums’ would be fairly obvious to anyone who has ever lived in shared or rented accommodation: keep the noise down, be a good neighbour! But it also signals a bigger problem with vanishing musical and communal ‘third’ spaces where loud music, loud kids and activity can exist, and the music in turn gets quieter and more invisible until you can’t hear what it is saying anymore.
We have gone from drum kits to electronic pads and deadened practice kits for the domestic drummer, to eventually having people in rented accommodation being so worried about noise complaints that they’ve had to create drum-less drums. No drummer prefers these, they are simply a way of protecting yourself from eviction. Living in matchbox houses with paper thin walls made of cheap and in-no-way soundproof material, packed so close you’re a stone’s throw from your neighbours, we’ve silenced the drumkit entirely.
Is it any surprise then that people are not forming bands in the numbers they used to 30 years ago? Is it a surprise that we moved from bands rehearsing in basements and garages in their houses, to samples, electronic kits, MIDI, solo ‘bedroom’ stuff; even as we lose more and more rehearsal spaces, and schools stop offering kids musical lessons because they must be inferior to subjects that lead to a job in IT or finance? We lose youth centres, community spaces, musical spaces, and everyone’s world gets a little quieter.
Gentrification. People move into the ‘fun’ parts of town and then file complaints against the very things that make an area ‘fun’ in the first place: music, noises, lights, life, later evening events and establishments. A residential permit accidentally granted to a builder in downtown Montreal’s vibrant entertainment and culture district and the subsequent noise complaints from residents who knowingly moved in next to an old, culturally significant music theatre, have recently led to the shutting of the 130-year old La Tulipe. Kingston, Ontario’s BLU Martini, a beautiful 400-capacity bar and music venue located right on the downtown waterfront, shut its doors this September after 41 years of playing an important role in the city’s homegrown music scene, ten in its final location. With no one else wanting to pick up the mantle, the space’s next inhabitants will be Chuck’s Roadhouse Bar and Grill, who aren’t particularly interested in ensuring the space continues to host emerging live musical talent. Cardiff grassroots venue The Moon, known for launching the careers of many of the UK’s best emerging musicians, closed its doors last month.
Tiny Horse (left) and The Wilderness (right) at Kingston's BLU Martini in 2024.
Elsewhere, city councils are so afraid of the word ‘rave’, they aren’t fully sure what it means but think it means ‘illicit drugs-taking event’ and want to ban any instance of it. The raves move out of the city, to obscure, remote locations, or abandon the city altogether. The city loses another piece of its existing culture.
Sometimes we stop the music right at the source: The Rehearsal Factory, a notable rehearsal space with spots all over Toronto, has dwindled down to 2 or 3 locations over the last 20 years, with their notable Richmond St. branch being sold off to a controversial Australian megachurch. Roswell Rehearsals lost its space in Kingston two years ago due to noise complaints, and its absence was sorely felt by the city’s many young, renting musicians who felt caught out by the lack of a dedicated musical space. Fearing hefty fines, potential police action and even eviction if they tried to practise indoors, the warm welcome it received on reopening its doors this October was evidence of how much it was needed in the local music community. As more and more artists live in rented or shared accommodations where practising out loud simply isn’t practical, the loss of rehearsal spaces within reasonable commuting distance is effectively the death of emerging music: it either is forced to spread itself thin hours outside of towns and cities, the congregation sites of culture and events, or it dies altogether, leaving the cultural fabric of the whole nation weaker and less colourful.
I wanted to take a walking tour of historically important music sites in London when I visited. As one of the music capitals of the world, London, and the UK by extension, have been responsible for a large amount of global popular culture: with an annual music export worth £2.5 billion in 2021, they are one of only 3 countries that exports more music than it imports, and the second-largest exporter overall.
The inner city of London alone has had many important venues, clubs, studios— the Blitz, where the New Romantic kids first congregated for their David Bowie nights in the 1980s, The 2i’s Coffee Bar, where many stars of the 1960s were discovered, including Cliff Richards, Tommy Steel, Francis Bacon and much of the skiffle movement, are just two examples.
New Romantic kids at the Blitz in Soho, London in the 1980s.
Neither exists anymore. Three-fourths of the planned London music tour involved looking for ghosts: empty spaces, corporate offices and residence buildings sitting on the burial grounds of moments of cultural significance. I didn’t end up doing the tour, I didn’t think I could bear to look at these places, to try and imagine what they once were and what their downfall means for the health of the modern music scene.
The London-based neo-jazz group Ezra Collective formed in 2012 as teenagers in a youth club: they were in the Tomorrow’s Warriors youth band, a music education initiative at the South Bank Centre in London. Eleven years later, they shone as the first-ever jazz winners of the prestigious Mercury Music Prize for their 2023 album, Where I’m Meant To Be, signalling a shift in how their musical movement blending traditional jazz with RnB, soul, electronic, alternative, Afrobeats and hip hop, has been steadily gaining legitimacy as a uniquely British sound, even within the traditional circles of jazz study where it was once treated as mongrel.
In his acceptance speech at the Mercuries, Ezra Collective percussionist Femi Koleoso took time to celebrate their youth club beginnings, praising the ‘good, special people putting time and effort into [helping] young people to play music’. Much has been made of the benefits music has for young people: everything from developing brains to keeping kids off the street, giving them a sense of community and purpose; something to look forward to and love. Ezra Collective are proof of just how far providing young people with musical spaces can go.
Sure, sites pop up and go down all the time, often shining brightly for a short period of time. That is part and parcel of being in the ideas- and coffee (alcohol?)-driven, volatile, passion-fuelled and chronically underfunded art scene that music is. But when over the years, we are left with less and less: fewer spaces, stricter laws, higher costs, less funding, decreasing importance given to the role musicians play in society, and ultimately fewer venues to play, fewer musicians, and certainly fewer of the vital working class voices that so often hold a mirror to our society, as music becomes the reserve of the rich, there is no doubting that its strength and conviction will dilute without conscious intervention.
It’s the same with the Bluetooth drums. I know the makers only want to do good, bless them for trying, and I don’t doubt a lot of people will find this a better practice solution than drawing MIDI notes on a quantized grid, because it still feels a little like playing live, albeit hitting the air with vibrating haptic feedback. It’ll be AR or VR drums next, inevitably. I’m aware of the passage of time and I don’t wish it ill.
What saddens me is that we lose so much of the spirit of art and culture to this dilution. The music getting quieter as to not offend the neighbours, even as musicians get slowly choked out of gentrified spaces. Writers being unable (or less freely able) to explore darker themes so as to not set the dogs of the ‘problematic writing’ police on them. Artists presenting as less dramatic so as to not appear ‘weird’ to an uninvested audience; TikTok’s adherence to a straitjacketed definition of correctly performed ‘authenticity’. Making fun of anyone who dares to dress weird, look different, say something new. You see it everywhere. Art gets diluted to become palatable with ever-diminishing returns, and in doing so it loses its ability to express itself and say something that needs to be said.
I don’t know. Some could look at it as the weird, twisted, fucked up plant growing through cracks in the pavement, doing what it can to reach the sunlight. Art surviving despite everything; changing, evolving, and somehow being more poignant and posing a stronger message as a result.
But even a 22h everlasting candle has an end. We’ve got to do more to protect our artistic spaces and outlets, and the ability to create without fear, or we risk losing them forever. It takes just one generation to train out habits; we see it with other obsolete things, let’s not let art be one of those.
Re zoning regulation reform: could you go into detail as what that would look like in terms of wiping the slate clean. I feel like it would be better to go the houston route and just be zoning free
You do not want to go the Houston route.
Houston may claim to be "zoning-free" - and to be fair, it doesn't have some of the more common regulations on land use, or density, or height restrictions (more on this in a minute) - but the reality is far more complicated and the status quo is not one that's friendly to the interests of working-class and poor residents, or to the possibility of sustainable urbanism.
The answer to NIMBYism isn't to abolish all regulations and let the free market rip, it's to surgically target zoning, planning, and litigation that is used against affordable housing, public/social housing, mass transit, clean energy, and walkable neighborhoods, and to replace it with new forms of regulation that encourage these forms of development.
So let's take take these categories in order.
Zoning
As I tell my Urban Studies students, zoning is both one of the most subtle and yet comprehensive ways in which the state shapes the urban environment - but historically it has been used almost exclusively in the interests of racism and classism. Reforming zoning requires going over the code with a fine-toothed comb to single out all the many ways in which zoning is used to make affordable housing impossible:
The most important one to tackle first is density zoning and building heights limitations. The former directly limits how many buildings you can have per unit of land (usually per acre), while the latter limits how big the buildings can be (expressed either as the number of stories or the number of feet, or as both). Closely associated with these zoning regulations are minimum lot size regulations (which regulate how much land each individual parcel of real estate has to cover, and thus how many how many housing units can be built in a given area), and lot coverage, setbacks, and minimum yard requirements (which limit how much square footage of a lot can be built on, and what kinds of structures you can build).
the other big one is use zoning. To begin with, we need to phase out "single use" zoning that designates certain areas as exclusively residential or commercial or industrial (a major factor that drives car-centric development, makes walkable neighborhoods impossible, and discourages the "insula" style apartment building that has been the core of urbanism since Ancient Rome) in favor of "mixed use" zoning that allows for neighborhoods that combine residential and commercial uses. Equally importantly, we need to eliminate single-family zoning and adopt zoning rules that allow for a mix of different kinds of housing (ADUs, duplexes and triplexes, rowhouses/terraced houses, apartment buildings).
finally, the most insidious zoning requirements are seemingly incidental regulations. For example, mandatory parking minimums not only prioitize car-dependent versus transit-oriented development but also eat up huge amounts of space per lot. The most nakedly classist is "unrelated persons" zoning, which is used to prevent poorer people from subdividing houses into apartments, which zaps young people who are looking to be roommates and older people looking to finance their retirements by running boarding houses or taking in lodgers, as well as landlords looking to convert houses from owner-occupied to rental properties.
So I would argue that the goal of reform should be not to eliminate zoning, but rather to establish model zoning codes that have been stripped of the historical legacies of racism and classism.
Planning
Similar to how zoning shouldn't be abolished but reformed, the correct approach to planning isn't to abolish planning departments wholesale, but to streamline the planning process - because the problem is that right now the planning process is too slow, which raises the costs of all kinds of development (we're focusing on housing right now, but the same holds true for clean energy projects), and it allows NIMBY groups to abuse the public hearings and environmental review process to block projects that are good for the environment and working-class and poor people but bad for affluent homeowners.
As those Ezra Klein interviews indicate, this is beginning to change due to a combination of reforms at both the state and federal level to speed up the CEQA and EPA environmental review process in a number of ways. For example, one change that's being made is to require planning agencies and environmental agencies to report on the environmental impact of not doing a project as well, to shift the discussion away from petty complaints about noise and traffic and "neighborhood character" (i.e, coded racism and classism) and towards real discussions of social and environmental justice.
At the same time, more is needed - especially to reform the public hearing process. While originally intended by Jane Jacobs and other activists in the 1970s as a democratic reform that would give local communities a voice in the planning process, "participatory planning" has become a way for special interests to exercise an unaccountable veto power over development. Because younger, poorer and more working class, and communities of color often don't have time to attend public hearing sessions during the workday, these meetings become dominated by older, whiter, and richer residents who claim to speak for the whole of the community.
Moreover, because community boards are appointed rather than elected and public hearings operate on a first-come-first-serve basis, an unrepresentative minority can create a false impression of community opposition by "stacking the mike" and dialing up their level of militancy and aggression in the face of elected officials and civil servants who want to avoid controversy. (It's a classic case of diffuse versus concentrated interests, something that I spend a lot of classroom time making sure that my students learn.)
Again, the point shouldn't be to eliminate public hearings and other forms of participatory planning, but to reform them so that they're more representative (shifting public hearings to weekends and allowing people to comment via Zoom and other online forums, conducting surveys of community opinion, using a progressive stack and requiring equal time between pro and anti speakers, etc.) and to streamline the review process for model projects in categories like affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit, etc.
Litigation
Alongside the main planning process, there is also a need to reform the litigation process around development. In addition to traditional tort lawsuits from property owners claiming damage to their property from development, a lot of planning and environemntal legislation allows for private groups to sue over a host of issues - whether the agency followed the correct procedures, whether it took into account concerns about this impact or that impact, and so forth.
As we saw with the case of Berkeley NIMBYs who used CEQA to block student housing projects over environmental impacts around "noise," this process can be used to either block projects outright, or even if the NIMBYs eventually lose in court, to draw out the process until projects fall apart due to lack of funding or the proponents simply lose their patience and give up.
This is why we're starting to see significant reforms to both state and federal legislation to streamline the litigation process. The categorical exemptions from review that I discussed above also have implications for litigation - you can't sue over reviews that didn't happen - but there are also efforts to speed up the litigation process through reducing what counts as "administrative record" or by putting a nine-month cap on court proceedings.
Again, this is an area where you have to be very surgical in your changes. Especially when the politics of the issue divide environmental groups and create odd coalitions between labor, business, climate change activists, and anti-regulation conservatives, you have to be careful that the changes you are making benefit affordable housing, clean energy, mass transit and the like, not oil pipelines and suburban sprawl.
