#RealPage | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago

Text

The housing emergency and the second Trump term

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 surveill ance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/11/nimby-yimby-fimby/#home-team-advantage

Postmortems and blame for the 2024 elections are thick on the ground, but amidst all those theories and pointed fingers, one explanation looms large and credible: the American housing emergency. If the system can't put a roof over your head, that system needs to go.

American housing has been in crisis for decades, of course, but it keeps getting worse…and worse…and worse. Americans pay more for worse housing than at any time in their history. Homelessness is at a peak that is soul-crushing to witness and maddening to experience. We turned housing – a human necessity second only to air, food and water – into an asset governed almost entirely by market forces, and so created a crisis that has consumed the nation.

The Trump administration has no plan to deal with housing. Or rather, they do have plans, but strictly of the "bad ideas only" variety. Trump wants to deport 11m undocumented immigrants, and their families, including citizens and Green Card holders (otherwise, that would be "family separation" and that's cruel). Even if you are the kind of monster who can set aside the ghoulishness of solving your housing problems by throwing someone in a concentration camp at gunpoint and then deporting them to a country where they legitimately fear for their lives, this still doesn't solve the housing emergency, and will leave America several million homes short.

Their other solution? Deregulation and tax cuts. We've seen this movie before, and it's an R-rated horror flick. Financial deregulation created the speculative mortgage markets that led to the 2008 housing crisis, which created a seemingly permanent incapacity to build new homes in America, as skilled tradespeople retired or changed careers and housebuilding firms left the market. Handing giant tax cuts to the monopolists who gobbled up the remains of these bankrupt small companies minted a dozen new housing billionaires who preside over companies that make more money than ever by building fewer homes:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91198443/housing-market-wall-streets-big-housing-market-bet-has-created-12-new-billionaires

This isn't working. Homelessness is ballooning. The only answer Trump and his regime have for our homeless neighbors is to just make it a crime to be homeless, sweeping up homeless encampments and busting homeless people for "loitering" (that is, existing in space). There is no universe in which this reduces homelessness. People who lose their homes aren't going to dig holes, crawl inside, and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. If anything, sweeps and arrests will make homelessness worse, by destroying the possessions, medication and stability that homeless people need if they are to become housed.

Today, The American Prospect published an excellent package on the housing emergency, looking at its causes and the road-tested solutions that can work even when the federal government is doing everything it can to make the problem worse:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-tackling-the-housing-crisis/

The Harris campaign ran on Biden's economic record, insisting that he had tamed inflation. It's true that the Biden admin took action against monopolists and greedflation, including criminal price-fixing companies like Realpage, which helps landlords coordinate illegal conspiracies to rig rents. Realpage sets the rents for the majority of homes in major metros, like Phoenix:

https://www.azag.gov/press-release/attorney-general-mayes-sues-realpage-and-residential-landlords-illegal-price-fixing

Of course, reducing inflation isn't the same as bringing prices down – it just means prices are going up more slowly. And sure, inflation is way down in many categories, but not in housing. In housing, inflation is accelerating:

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-03-08/inflation-housing-shortage-economy-cpi-fed-interest-rate

The housing emergency makes everything else worse. Blue states are in danger of losing Congressional seats because people are leaving big cities: not because they want to, but because they literally can't afford to keep a roof over their heads. LGBTQ people fleeing fascist red state legislatures and their policies on trans and gay rights can't afford to move to the states where they will be allowed to simply live:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/business/economy/lgbtq-moving-cost.html

So what are the roots of this problem, and what can we do about it? The housing emergency doesn't have a unitary cause, but among the most important factors is fuckery that led to the Great Financial Crisis and the fuckery that followed on from it, as Ryan Cooper writes:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-housing-industry-never-recovered-great-recession/

The Glass-Steagall Act was a 1933 banking regulation created to prevent Great Depression-style market crashes. It was killed in 1999 by Bill Clinton, who declared, "the Glass–Steagall law is no longer appropriate." Nine years later, the global economy melted down in a Great Depression-style market crash fueled by reckless speculation of the sort that Glass-Steagall had prohibited.

The crash of 2008 took down all kinds of industries, but none were so hard-hit as home-building (after all, mortgages were the raw material of the financial bubble that popped in 2008). After 2008, construction of new housing fell by 90% for the next two years. This protracted nuclear winter in the housing market killed many associated industries. Skilled tradespeople retrained, or "left the job market" (a euphemism for becoming disabled, homeless, or destroyed). Waves of bankruptcies swept through the construction industry. The construction workforce didn't recover to pre-crisis levels for 16 years (and of course, by then, there was a huge backlog of unbuilt homes, and a larger population seeking housing).

Meanwhile, the collapse of every part of the housing supply chain – from raw materials to producers – set the stage for monopoly rollups, with the biggest firms gobbling up all these distressed smaller firms. Thanks to this massive consolidation, homebuilders were able to build fewer houses and extract higher profits by gouging on price. They doubled down on this monopoly price-gouging during the pandemic supply shocks, raising prices well above the pandemic shortage costs.

The housing market is monopolized in ways that will be familiar to anyone angry about consolidation in other markets – from eyeglasses to pharma to tech. One builder, HR Horton, is the largest player in 3 of the country's largest markets, and it has tripled its profits since 2005 while building half as many houses. Modern homebuilders don't build: they use their scale to get land at knock-down rates, slow-walk the planning process, and then farm out the work to actual construction firms at rates that barely keep the lights on:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-the-homebuilder

Monopolists can increase profits by constraining supply. 60% of US markets are "highly concentrated" and the companies that dominate these markets are starving homebuilding in them to the tune of $106b/year:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3303984

There are some obvious fixes to this, but they are either unlikely under Trump (antitrust action to break up builders based on their share in each market) or impossible to imagine (closing tax loopholes that benefit large building firms). Likewise, we could create a "homes guarantee" that would act as an "automatic stabilizer." That would mean that any time the economy slips into recession, this would trigger automatic funding to pay firms to build public housing, thus stimulating the economy and alleviating the housing supply crisis:

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialHousing.pdf

The Homes Guarantee is further explained in a separate article in the package by Sulma Arias from People's Action, who describes how grassroots activists fighting redlining planted the seeds of a legal guarantee of a home:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-why-we-need-homes-guarantee/

Arias describes the path to a right to a home as running through the mass provision of public housing – and what makes that so exciting is that public housing can be funded, administered and built by local or state governments, meaning this is a thing that can happen even in the face of a hostile or indifferent federal regime.

In Paul E Williams's story on FIMBY (finance in my back yard), the executive director of Center for Public Enterprise offers an inspirational story of how local governments can provide thousands of homes:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

Williams recounts the events of 2021 in Montgomery County, Maryland, where a county agency stepped in to loan money to a property developer who had land, zoning approval and work crews to build a major new housing block, but couldn't find finance. Montgomery County's Housing Opportunities Commission made a short-term loan at market rates to the developer.

By 2023, the building was up and the loan had been repaid. All 268 units are occupied and a third are rented at rates tailored to low-income tenants. The HOC is the permanent owner of those homes. It worked so well that Montgomery's HOC is on track to build 3,000 more public homes this way:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

Other – in red states! – have followed suit, with lookalike funds and projects in Atlanta and Chattanooga, with "dozens" more plans underway at state and local levels. The Massachusetts Momentum Fund is set to fund 40,000 homes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/affordable-housing-montgomery-county.html

The Center for Public Enterprise has a whole report on these "Government Sponsored Enterprises" and the role they can play in creating a supply of homes priced at a rate that working people can afford:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-fimby-finance-in-my-backyard/

Of course, for a GSE to loan money to build a home, that home has to be possible. YIMBYs are right to point to restrictive zoning as a major impediment to building new homes, and Robert Cruickshank from California YIMBY has a piece breaking down the strategy for fixing zoning:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-make-it-legal-to-build/

Cruickshank lays out NIMBY success stories in cities like Austin and Minneapolis adopting YIMBY-style zoning rules and seeing significant improvements in rental prices. These success stories are representative of a broader recognition – at least among Democratic politicians – that restrictive zoning is a major contributor to the housing emergency.

Repeating these successes in the rest of the country will take a long time, and in the meantime, American tenants are sitting ducks for predatory landlords, With criminal enterprises like Realpage enabling collusive price-fixing for housing and monopoly developers deliberately restricting supplies to keep prices up (a recent Blackrock investor communique gloated over the undersupply of housing as a source of profits for its massive portfolio of rental properties), tenants pay more and more of their paychecks for worse and worse accommodations. They can't wait for the housing emergency to be solved through zoning changes and public housing. They need relief now.

That's where tenants' unions come in, as Ruthy Gourevitch and Tara Raghuveer of the Tenant Union Federation writes in their piece on the tenants across the country who are coordinating rent strikes to protest obscene rent-hikes and dangerous living conditions:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-12-11-look-for-the-tenant-union/

They describe a country where tenants work multiple jobs, send the majority of their take-home pay to their landlords – a quarter of tenants pay 70% of their wages in rent – and live in vermin-filled homes without heat or ventilation:

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/terms-of-investment/

Public money from Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac flood into the speculative market for multifamily homes, a largely unregulated, subsidized speculative bonanza that lets the wealthy make bets and the poor pay their losses.

In response, tenants unions are popping up all across the country, especially in red state cities like Bozeman, MT and Louisville, KY. They organize for "just cause" evictions that ban landlords from taking their homes away. They seek fair housing voucher distribution practices. They seek to close eviction loopholes like the LA wheeze that lets landlords kick you out following "renovations."

The National Tenant Policy Agenda demands "national rent caps, anti-eviction protections, habitability standards, and antitrust action," measures that would immediately and profoundly improve the lives of millions of American workers:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JF1-fTalW1tOBO0FhYDcVvEd1kQ2HIzkYFNRo6zmSsg/edit

They caution that it's not enough to merely increase housing supply. Without a strong countervailing force from organized tenants, new housing can be just another source of extraction and speculation for the rich. They say that the Federal Housing Finance Agency – regulator for Fannie and Freddie – could play an active role in ensuring that new housing addresses the needs of people, not corporations.

In the meantime, a tenants' union in KC successfully used a rent strike – where every tenant in a building refuses to pay rent – to get millions in overdue repairs. More strikes are planned across the country.

The American system is in crisis. A country that cannot house its people is a failure. As Rachael Dziaba writes in the final piece for the package, the situation is so bad that water has started to flow uphill: the cities with the most inward migration have the least job growth:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-10-18-housing-blues/

It's not just housing, of course. Americans pay more for health care than anyone else in the rich world and get worse outcomes than anyone else in the rich world. Their monopoly grocers have spiked their food prices. The incoming administration has declared war on public education and seeks to relegate poor children to unsupervised schools where "education" can consist of filling in forms on a Chromebook and learning that the Earth is only 5,000 years old.

A system that can't shelter, feed, educate or care for its people is a failure. People in failed states will vote for anyone who promises to tear the system down. The decision to turn life's necessities over to unregulated, uncaring markets has produced a populace who are so desperate for change, they'll even vote for their own destruction.

#pluralistic #hysteresis #bubbles #bubblenomics #finance #nimby #yimby #restrictive zoning #localism #maslows hierarchy of needs #realpage #the rents too damned high #housing #weaponized shelter #rent strikes #tenants unions #the american prospect

255 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 4 days ago

Text

Petard (Part I)

Few things are more wrong than "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Companies sell you out when they can, which is why John Deere tractor milks farmers for needless repair callouts and why your iPhone spies on you to provide data to Apple's surveillance advertising service:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

When a vendor abuses you, that's not punishment for you being a cheapskate and wanting to use services for free. Vendors who screw you over do so because they know they can get away with it, because you are locked in and can't shop elsewhere. The ultimate manifestation of this is, of course, prison-tech. A duopoly of private equity-backed prison-tech profiteers have convinced prisons and jails across America to get rid of calls, in-person visits, mail, parcels, libraries, and continuing ed, and replace them all with tablets that charge prisoners vastly more than people in the free world pay to access media and connect with the outside. Those prisoners are absolutely paying for the product – indeed, with the national average prison wage set at $0.53/hour, they're paying far more than anyone outside pays – and they are still the product.

Capitalists, after all, hate capitalism. For all the romantic odes to the "invisible hand" and all the bafflegab about "efficient market hypothesis," the actual goal of businesses is to make you an offer you literally can't refuse. Capitalists want monopolies, they want captive audiences. "Competition," as Peter Thiel famously wrote, "is for losers."

Few lock-in arrangements are harder to escape than the landlord-tenant relationship. Moving home is expensive, time-consuming, and can rip you away from your job, your kid's school, and your community. Landlords know it, which is why they conspire to rig rents through illegal price-fixing apps like Realpage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/27/ai-conspiracies/#epistemological-collapse

And why they fill your home with Internet of Shit appliances that pick your pockets by requiring special, expensive consumables, and why they tack so many junk fees onto your monthly rent:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/01/housing-is-a-human-right/

Tenants aren't quite as locked in as prisoners, but corporations correctly understand that you can really fuck with a tenant over a long timescale without losing their business, and so they do.

Ironically, monopolists love each other. I guess if you loathe competition, a certain kind of cooperation comes naturally. That's why so many landlords have forged unholy alliances with internet service providers, who – famously – offer Americans the slowest speeds at the highest prices in the rich world, trail the world in infrastructure investment, and reap profits that put their global cousins in the shade.

Many's the apartment building that comes with a monopoly ISP that has a deal with your landlord. Landlords and ISPs call this "bulk billing" and swear that it reduces the cost of internet service for everyone. In reality, tenants who live under these arrangements have produced a deep, unassailable record proving that they pay more for worse broadband than the people next door who get to choose their ISPs. What's more, ISPs who offer "bulk billing" openly offer kickbacks to landlords who choose them over their rivals – in other words, even if you're paying for the product (your fucking home), you are still the product, sold to an evil telco.

Under Biden, the FCC banned the practice of ISPs paying kickbacks to landlords, over squeals and howls of protests from industry bodies like the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), National Apartment Association (NAA), and Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center (RETTC). These landlord groups insisted – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that when your landlord gets to choose your ISP, they do so with your best interests at heart, getting you a stellar deal you couldn't get for yourself.

This week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr – who voted for the ban on kickbacks – rescinded the rule, claiming that he was doing so to protect tenants. This is obvious bullshit, as is evidenced by the confetti-throwing announcements froom the NMHC, NAA and RETTC:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Reading Jon Brodkin's Ars Technica coverage of Carr's betrayal of millions of Americans, I was reminded of a short story I published in 2014: "Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts," which I wrote for Bruce Sterling's "12 Tomorrows" anthology from MIT Tech Review. It's a fun little sf story about this same bullshit, dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

Realizing that there were people who were sounding the alarm about this more than a decade ago was a forceful reminder that Trumpism isn't exactly new. The idea that government should serve up the American people as an all-you-can-eat buffet for corporations that use tech to supercharge their predatory conduct has been with us for a hell of a long time. I've written a hell of a lot of science fiction about this, and sometimes this leads people to credit me with predictive powers. But if I predicted anything with my story "Radicalized," in which furious, grieving men murder the health industry execs who denied their loved ones coverage, I predicted the present, not the future:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2024-12-09-radicalized-cory-doctorow-story-health-care/

Likewise in my story "Unauthorized Bread," which "predicted" that landlords would use "smart" appliances to steal from their poorest, most vulnerable tenants:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

It's not much of a "prediction" to simply write a story in which "Internet of Things" companies' sales literature is treated as a straightforward idea and writing about how it will all work.

The same goes for "Petard." The most "predictive" part of that story is the part where I take the human rights implications of internet connections seriously. Back then (and even today), there were and are plenty of Very Serious People who want you to know that internet service is a frivolity, a luxury, a distraction:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

They deride the idea that broadband is a human right, even after the pandemic's lesson that you depend on your internet connection for social connections, civic life, political engagement, education, health and employment:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#fiber-now

Writing sf about this stuff isn't predictive, but I like to think that it constitutes an effective rebuttal to the people who say that taking digital rights seriously is itself unserious. Given that, I got to thinking about "Petard," and how much I liked that little story from 2014.

So I've decided to serialize it, in four parts, starting today. If you're impatient to get the whole story, you can listen to my podcast of it, which I started in 2014, then stopped podcasting for four years (!) before finishing in 2018:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

It's not that I wanted to make the elf cry. I'm not proud of the fact. But he was an elf for chrissakes. What was he doing manning — elfing — the customer service desk at the Termite Mound? The Termite Mound was a tough assignment — given MIT's legendary residency snafus, it was a sure thing that someone like me would be along every day to ruin his day.

"Come on," I said, "cut it out. Look, it's nothing personal."

He continued to weep, face buried dramatically in his long-fingered hands, pointed ears protruding from his fine, downy hair as it flopped over his ivory-pale forehead. Elves.

I could have backed down, gone back to my dorm and just forgiven the unforgivably stupid censorwall there, used my personal node for research or stuck to working in the lab. But I had paid for the full feed. I needed the full feed. I deserved the full feed. I was 18. I was a grownup, and the infantalizing, lurking censorwall offended my intellect and my emotions. I mean, seriously, fuck that noise.

"Would you stop?" I said. "Goddamnit, do your job."

The elf looked up from his wet hands and wiped his nose on his mottled raw suede sleeve. "I don't have to take this," he said. He pointed to a sign: "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER."

"I'm not abusing you," I said. "I'm just making my point. Forcefully."

He glared at me from behind a curtain of dandelion-fluff hair. "Abuse includes verbal abuse, raised voices, aggressive language and tone –"

I tuned him out. This was the part where I was supposed to say, "I know this isn't your fault, but –" and launch into a monologue explaining how his employer had totally hosed me by not delivering what they'd promised, and had further hosed him by putting him in a situation where he was the only one I could talk to about it, and he couldn't do anything about it. This little pantomime was a fixture of life in the world, the shrugs-all-round nostrum that we were supposed to substitute for anything getting better ever.

Like I said, though, fuck that noise. What is the point of being smart, 18 years old and unemployed if you aren't willing to do something about this kind of thing. Hell, the only reason I'd been let into MIT in the first place was that I was constitutionally incapable of playing out that little scene.

The elf had run down and was expecting me to do my bit. Instead, I said, "I bet you're in the Termite Mound, too, right?"

He got a kind of confused look. "That's PII," he said. "This office doesn't give out personally identifying information. It's in the privacy policy –" He tapped another sign posted by his service counter, one with much smaller type. I ignored it.

"I don't want someone else's PII. I want yours. Do you live in the residence? You must, right? Get a staff discount on your housing for working here, I bet." Elves were always cash-strapped. Surgery's not cheap, even if you're prepared to go to Cuba for it. I mean, you could get your elf-pals to try to do your ears for you, but only if you didn't care about getting a superbug or ending up with gnarly stumps sticking out of the side of your head. And forget getting a Nordic treatment without adult supervision, I mean, toot, toot, all aboard the cancer express. You had to be pretty insanely desperate to go elf without the help of a pro.

He looked stubborn. I mean, elf-stubborn, which is a kind of chibi version of stubborn that's hard to take seriously. I mean, seriously. "Look, of course you live in the Termite Mound. Whatever. The point is, we're all screwed by this stuff. You, me, them –" I gestured at the room full of people. They all been allocated a queue-position on entry to the waiting room and were killing time until they got their chance to come up to the Window of Eternal Disappointment in order to play out I Know This Isn't Your Fault But… before returning to their regularly scheduled duties as a meaningless grain of sand being ground down by the unimaginably gigantic machinery of MIT Residency LLC.

"Let's do something about it, all right? Right here, right now."

He gave me a look of elven haughtiness that he'd almost certainly practiced in the mirror. I waited for him to say something. He waited for me to wilt. Neither of us budged.

"I'm not kidding. The censorwall has a precisely calibrated dose of fail. It works just enough that it's worth using most of the time, and the amount of hassle and suck and fail you have to put up with when it gets in the way is still less than the pain you'd have to endure if you devoted your life to making it suck less. The economically rational course of action is to suck it up.

"What I propose is that we change the economics of this bullshit. If you're the Termite Mound's corporate masters, you get this much benefit out of the shitty censorwall; but we, the residents of the Termite Mound, pay a thousand times that in aggregate." I mimed the concentrated interests of the craven fools who'd installed the censorwall, making my hands into a fist-wrapped-in-a-fist, then exploding them like a hoberman-sphere to show our diffuse mutual interests, expanding to dwarf the censorware like Jupiter next to Io. "So here's what I propose: let's mound up all this diffuse interest, mobilize it, and aim it straight at the goons who put you in a job. You sit there all day and suffer through our abuse because all you're allowed to do is point at your stupid sign."

"How?" he said. I knew I had him.

Kickstarter? Hacker, please. Getting strangers to combine their finances so you can chase some entrepreneurial fantasy of changing the world by selling people stuff is an idea that was dead on arrival. If your little kickstarted business is successful enough to compete with the big, dumb titans, you'll end up being bought out or forced out or sold out, turning you into something indistinguishable from the incumbent businesses you set out to destroy. The problem isn't that the world has the wrong kind of sellers — it's that it has the wrong kind of buyers. Powerless, diffused, atomized, puny and insubstantial.

Turn buyers into sellers and they just end up getting sucked into the logic of fail: it's unreasonable to squander honest profits on making people happier than they need to be in order to get them to open their wallets. But once you get all the buyers together in a mass with a unified position, the sellers don't have any choice. Businesses will never spend a penny more than it takes to make a sale, so you have to change how many pennies it takes to complete the sale.

Back when I was fourteen, it took me ten days to hack together my first Fight the Power site. On the last day of the fall term, Ashcroft High announced that catering was being turned over to Atos Catering. Atos had won the contract to run the caf at my middle school in my last year there, every one of us lost five kilos by graduation. The French are supposed to be good at cooking, but the slop Atos served wasn't even food. I'm pretty sure that after the first week they just switched to filling the steamer trays with latex replicas of grey, inedible glorp. Seeing as how no one was eating it, there was no reason to cook up a fresh batch every day.

The announcement came at the end of the last Friday before Christmas break, chiming across all our personal drops with a combined bong that arrived an instant before the bell rang. The collective groan was loud enough to drown out the closing bell. It didn't stop, either, but grew in volume as we filtered into the hall and out of the building into the icy teeth of Chicago's first big freeze of the season.

Junior high students aren't allowed off campus at lunchtime, but high school students — even freshmen — can go where they please so long as they're back by the third period bell. That's where Fight the Power came in.

WE THE UNDERSIGNED PLEDGE

TO BOYCOTT THE ASHCROFT HIGH CAFETERIA WHILE ATOS HAS THE CONTRACT TO SUPPLY IT

TO BUY AT LEAST FOUR LUNCHES EVERY WEEK FROM THE FOLLOWING FOOD TRUCKS [CHECK AT LEAST ONE]:

This was tricky. It's not like there were a lot of food trucks driving out of the loop to hit Joliet for the lunch rush. But I wrote a crawler that went through the review sites, found businesses with more than one food truck, munged the menus and set out the intersection as an eye-pleasing infographic showing the appetizing potential of getting your chow outside of the world of the corrupt no-bid edu-corporate complex.

By New Year's Day, 98 percent of the student body had signed up. By January third, I had all four of the food-trucks I'd listed lined up to show up on Monday morning.

Turns out, Ashcroft High and Atos had a funny kind of deal. Ashcroft High guaranteed a minimum level of revenue to Atos, and Atos guaranteed a maximum level to Ashcroft High. So, in theory, if a hundred percent of the student body bought a cafeteria lunch, about twenty percent of that money would be kicked back to Ashcroft High. They later claimed that this was all earmarked to subsidize the lunches of poor kids, but no one could ever point to anything in writing where they'd committed to this, as our Freedom of Information Act requests eventually proved.

In return for the kickback, the school had promised to ensure that Atos could always turn a profit. If not enough of us ate in the caf, the school would have to give Atos the money it would have made if we had. In other words: our choice to eat a good lunch wasn't just costing the school its expected share of Atos's profits — it was having to dig money out of its budget to make up for our commitment to culinary excellence.

They tried everything. Got the street in front of the school designated a no-food-trucks zone (we petitioned the City of Joliet to permit parking on the next street over). Shortened the lunch-break (we set up a Web-based pre-order service that let us pick and pre-pay for our food). Banned freshmen from leaving school property (we were saved by the PTA). Suspended me for violating the school's social media policy (the ACLU wrote them a blood-curdling nastygram, and raised nearly $30,000 in donations of $3 or less from students around the world once word got out).

Atos wouldn't let them re-negotiate the contract, either. If Ashcroft High wanted out, it would have to buy it's way out. That's when I convinced the vice-principal to let me work with the AP Computer Science class to build out a flexible, open version of Fight the Power that anyone could install and run for their own student bodies, providing documentation and support. That was just before Spring Break. By May 1, there were 87 schools whose students used Ftp to organize Atos alternative food-trucks for their own cafeterias.

Suddenly, this was news. Not just local news, either. Global. Atos had to post an earnings warning in their quarterly report. Suddenly, we had Bloomberg and Al Jazeera Business camera crews buttonholing Ashcroft High kids on their way to the lunch-trucks. Whenever they grabbed me, I would give them this little canned speech about how Atos couldn't supply decent food and were taking money out of our educational budgets rather than facing the fact that the children they were supposed to be feeding hated their slop so much that they staged a mass walkout. It played well with kids in other schools, and very badly with Atos's shareholders. But I'll give this to Atos: I couldn't have asked for a better Evil Empire to play Jedi against. They threatened to sue me — for defamation! — which made the whole thing news again. Stupidly, they sued me in Illinois, which has a great anti-SLAPP law, and was a massive technical blunder. The company's US headquarters were in Clearwater, Florida, and Florida is a trainwreck in every possible sense, including its SLAPP laws. If they'd sued me in their home turf, I'd have gone bankrupt before I could win.

They lost. The ACLU collected $102,000 in fees from them. The story of the victory was above the fold on Le Monde's site for a week. Turns out that French people loathe Atos even more than the rest of us, because they've had longer to sharpen their hate.

Long story slightly short: we won. Atos "voluntarily" released our school from its contract. And Fight the Power went mental. I spent that summer vacation reviewing Github commits on Ftp, as more and more people discovered that they could make use of a platform that made fighting back stupid simple. The big stupid companies were whales and we were their krill, and all it took was some glue to glom us all together into boulders of indigestible matter that could choke them to death.

I dropped out of Ashcroft High in the middle of the 11th grade and did the rest of my time with homeschooling shovelware that taught me exactly what I needed to pass the GED and not one tiny thing more. I didn't give a shit. I was working full time on Ftp, craiglisting rides to to hacker unconferences where I couchsurfed and spoke, giving my poor parental units eight kinds of horror. It would've been simpler if I'd taken donations for Ftp, because Mom and Dad quickly came to understand that their role as banker in our little family ARG gave them the power to yank me home any time I moved out of their comfort zone. But there was the balance of terror there, because they totally knew that if I had accepted donations for the project, I'd have been financially independent in a heartbeat.

Plus, you know, they were proud of me. Ftp makes a difference. It's not a household name or anything, but more than a million people have signed up for Ftp campaigns since I started it, and our success rate is hovering around 25 percent. That means that I'd changed a quarter-million lives for the better (at least) before I turned 18. Mom and Dad, they loved that (which is not to say that they didn't need the occasional reminder of it). And shit, it got me a scholarship at MIT. So there's that.

Network filters are universally loathed. Duh. No one's ever written a regular expression that can distinguish art from porn and no one ever will. No one's ever assembled an army of prudes large enough to hand-sort the Internet into "good" and "bad" buckets. No one ever will. The Web's got 100-odd billion pages on it; if you have a failure rate of one tenth of one percent, you'll overblock (or underblock) (or both) 100,000,000 pages. That's several Library of Congress's worth of pointless censorship — or all the porn ever made, times ten, missed though underfiltering. You'd be an idiot to even try.

Idiot like a fox! If you don't care about filtering out "the bad stuff" (whatever that is), censorware is a great business to be in. The point of most network filters is the "security syllogism":

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

I HAVE DONE SOMETHING.

SOMETHING HAS BEEN DONE.

VICTORY!

Hand-wringing parents don't want their precious offspring looking at weiners and hoo-hahs when they're supposed to be amassing student debt, so they demand that the Termite Mound fix the problem by Doing Something. The Termite Mound dispenses cash to some censorware creeps in a carefully titrated dose that is exactly sufficient to demonstrate Something Has Been Doneness to a notional weiner-enraged parent. Since all the other dorms, schools, offices, libraries, airports, bus depots, train stations, cafes, hotels, bars, and theme parks in the world are doing exactly the same thing, each one can declare itself to be in possession of Best Practices when there is an unwanted hoo-hah eruption, and culpability diffuses to a level that is safe for corporate governance and profitability. #MissionAccomplished.

And so the whole world suffers under this pestilence. Millions of times every day — right at this moment — people are swearing at their computers: What. The. Fuck. Censorware's indifference to those minute moments of suffering is only possible because they've never been balled up into a vast screaming meteor of rage.

"Hey there, hi! Look, I'm here because I need unfiltered Internet access to get through my degree. So do you all, right? But the Termite Mound isn't going to turn it off because that would be like saying 'Here kids, have a look at this porn,' which they can't afford to say, even though, seriously, who gives a shit, right?"

I had them at 'porn," but now I had to keep them.

"Look at your tenancy agreement: you're paying twenty seven bucks a month for your network access at the Termite Mound. Twenty seven bucks — each! I'll find us an ISP that can give all of us hot and cold running genitals and all the unsavory religious extremism, online gaming, and suicide instructions we can eat. Either I'm going to make the Termite Mound give us the Internet we deserve, or we'll cost it one of its biggest cash-cows and humiliate it on the world stage.

"I don't want your money. All I want is for you to promise me that if I can get us Internet from someone who isn't a censoring sack of shit, that you'll come with me. I'm going to sign up every poor bastard in the Termite Mound, take that promise to someone who isn't afraid to work hard to earn a dollar, and punish the Termite Mound for treating us like this. And then, I'm going to make a loud noise about what we've done, and spread the word to every other residence in Cambridge, then Boston, then across America. I'm going to spread out to airports, hotels, train stations, buses, taxis — any place where they make it their business to decide what data we're allowed to see."

I whirled around to face the elf, who leapt back, long fingers flying to his face in an elaborate mime of startlement. "Are you with me, pal?"

He nodded slightly.

"Come on," I said. "Let 'em hear you."

He raised one arm over his head, bits of rabbit fur and uncured hides dangling from his skinny wrist. I felt for him. I think we all did. Elves.

He was a convincer, though. By the time I left the room, I already had 29 signups.

All evil in the world is the result of an imbalance between the people who benefit from shenanigans and the people who get screwed by shenanigans. De-shenaniganifying the world is the answer to pollution and poverty and bad schools and the war on some drugs and a million other horribles. To solve all the world's problems, I need kick-ass raw feeds and a steady supply of doofus thugs from central casting to make idiots of. I know where I can find plenty of the latter, and I'm damn sure going to get the former. Watch me.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#captive-market

#pluralistic #aaronsw #science fiction #big cable #telecoms #isps #net neutrality #boston #mit #fcc #National Multifamily Housing Council #NMHC #National Apartment Association #NAA #Real Estate Technology and Transformation Center

115 notes · View notes