Why We Can’t Build Better Cities (ft.Not Just Bikes)

this is the building where I was born it used to be a hospital but now it's luxury Flats apartments in there go for about £600,000 ironic that I can't afford to live in the room where my life began this is Newcastle a city in the north of England with a population of about 900,000 if you include all the bers according to data from the UN 55% of the world's population live in urban environments and that number is only going to go up the design of cities affects people's Access to Health Care housing and utilities Cities

play a critical role in our economy and they shape the people that live in them but the way our cities are developing is causing some major problems to solve them we're going to have to think differently and that might be very difficult so come with me on a journey from the city where I was born to the city I live in today [Music] [Music] how are y'all we'll start today not with a big bad City but with the countryside after all cities can be dark dangerous Cutthroat fastpaced full of corporate types living complicated lives in

a way that's just plain out of touch with the down home clean authentic morally minded way of Independent Living you can find in the country am I right no I'm not right I'm full of I don't even know how to play this what is this the violin someone get me a cappuccino where's my iPhone I've been reading this the lies of the land by historian Steven con and it turns out that a lot of the things we think about the country aren't actually true for example we might think that the countryside is clean but actually

thanks to AGR business Mining and the military a lot of the American Countryside in particular is very polluted we might think that the country is closer to nature but actually the miles of corn and soybeans are the result of Decades of biological engineering we might think that living in the country is better for the environment but actually lowdensity living is a lot less efficient more distance between homes means more miles of cables roads pipes less public transport it might sound counterintuitive but cons says that if you live in a city your per capita energy consumption

is probably a lot lower we might think that the countryside offers a simpler way of life but actually rural areas are often at the Forefront of innovation in technology finance and worker management that's because though we may think of them as small and quaint actually rural areas are The Stomping Ground of some of the biggest corporations in the world and that's not always a good thing we might think that rural Britain is more authentically British I've certainly heard people in my country talk that way but actually a lot of the big corporations that work out

there are really dependent on migrant labor and we might think that people in the country are living independently but actually a lot of them are under pretty tight corporate and government control according to this article from the Bureau of investigative journalism British Farms are inventing all new ways to brutalize and exploit migrant workers the conditions they describe are horrific Britain may even be violating modern slavery laws to grow our food all seemingly with the government's knowledge all of which is to say that we tend to romanticize a lot when we think about the countryside KH

says that City dwellers might enjoy the fantasy of a simpler life maybe we think about living on a farm someday but always we dream of being the person who owns the farm not the person working it and Country folk might want to believe these myths too partly because it's profitable think of country music and tourism selling this fantasy of a simpler life but also the desire to believe the lies of the land goes even deeper one of the common themes that I found in my research for this episode is that places produce the people that

live in them in technical philosophy language we'd say that they produce subjectivities ways of thinking and seeing and being in the world longstanding viewers of the show might remember a similar idea from our episode on transhumanism in that we learned that technologies have ways of seeing which they lend us when we use them like if all you have is a hammer all your problems look like nails well we might think of an urban place or a rural place as a piece of technology as something that has been designed for human beings to use and so

we might ask what kind of subjectivities does it produce how does it make us see and be KH gives a great example when he talks about Army towns the US military builds a lot of bases in rural areas so many in fact that if you added them all up they'd be their own State the size of Kentucky and the presence of a base in a town gives people a sense of identity if you grow up somewhere where there are a lot of troops around maybe you talk to them occasionally maybe members of your family sign

up to serve their country that's going to affect the way you see the world serving country is actually my profile name on grinder KH says this produces a kind of contradictory subjectivity cuz on the one hand the people in those towns are dependent on the bases staying open cuz that's their whole economy they are invested literally in the US constantly expanding its military budget but on the other hand because the military recruits a lot from those towns they also disproportionately bear the costs a lot of the American casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan were country boys

and country girls and con speculates that this two-sided relationship might explain Donald Trump's popularity in military towns in the 2016 election Trump criticized the politicians who sent the children of those towns to die was at the same time not criticizing the institution of the military itself and in fact promising to expand it the people who liked that message had been shaped by where they live it affected how they see the world everything I've told you so far is an Amo B I have already given you everything that you need to understand the rest of this

video including the twist but we've got a ways to go before we get there cuz it's not just the countryside we need to mythbust before we reach the city we have to walk through the suburbs and for that I'm going to need some help from my friend Jason better known by his YouTube handle not just bikes ah the suburbs the concept has been around for a long time but they really took off as soon as trains were invented the early modern suburbs were found along train lines or street car lines and the street car suburbs

of the early 1900s were Peak North American urban planning but in the US and Canada it has been illegal to build these kind of neighborhoods for about 70 years so when most people think about suburbs today they think about Suburbia the modern card dependent suburb something that didn't exist until about the 1940s Canada the country where I'm from a is very much a Suburban country over 75% of Canadians live in a place that could be considered suburban and the majority of those places are car dependent this means that the people who live there need to

use their cars to do almost anything even something as simple as buying a bag of milk requires a motor vehicle there are lots of myths about car dependenc in Suburbia but the one that is the most Incorrect and damaging is the idea that the people who live there are somehow financing urban areas when in fact we now know that Suburbia is financially insolvent suburbanites want to have the benefits of rural living the space between your neighbors the big yards and Lawns the Romantic idea of living independently and driving a pickup truck though the suburbanite version

has leather seats and a truck bed too small for a sheet of plywood but suburbanites also expect all of the benefits of urban living paved streets sidewalks good schools connections to Municipal Water and Sewage lines snow clearing garbage pickup reliable electricity good coverage of police and fire services and no traffic ever why won't they widen this road already unfortunately all of these Urban amenities come with a cost every extra mile of road and Lawn means another mile of water M sewage pipes electrical wires flood protection infrastructure and asphalt every new house means another car or

six that needs to be accommodated for both in the size of the roads and the size of the parking lots um that's free parking of course we're not a bunch of Europeans so car dependent Suburbia has a very low value per acre for tax purposes but a very high cost per acre for infrastructure services and amenities especially the replacement cost of that infrastructure at the end of its life cycle which is more than the initial cost to build it this mismatch between tax revenue and the cost of infrastructure has been questioned for decades but it's

only recently that these costs have actually been calculated in detail one of the first a shine of Spotlight on this issue was strong towns a nonprofit organization started by an American traffic engineer who used to build painfully ugly and inefficient places like this he realized that his city did not have the money required to build the car dependent places he was Building without taking on debt but what was worse is that they also had nowhere near enough money to maintain them in the future and these growing long-term liabilities put his town on track to becoming

financially insolvent inspired by strong towns the consulting company Urban 3 has started working with municipalities to help them understand where the gaps are in their financing they have worked with real data from dozens of cities and towns to create visual maps of which regions are a net positive and which are a net negative to City finances and they have found the same results car dependent places like this all always require more money to support them than they generate in tax revenue and walkable places even the rundown poverty-stricken and blighted urban downtowns that suburbanites are scared

to go to consistently subsidize wealthy Suburban neighborhoods it's actually kind of messed up this is one of the reasons why cities all over the world have been trying to urbanize their Suburban places by bringing more density where there were previously parking lots by trying to bring some public transit to car Centric Suburban places and by encouraging people to walk and cycle and just generally trying to make them slightly less hostile to anybody outside of a car but it is a Monumental task to urbanize these Seas of asphalt and bring them into the realm of Financial

and environmental sustainability we know however that the design of places shapes the subjectivities of the people who live there so when suburbanites build their entire lives around driving it can be very very hard to change that behavior Jason is right this is jasmond a suburb of Newcastle about 10 minutes walk from the old hospital luxury Flats where I was born and just like he said this area was developed out of Farmland in the 19th century along a train line for wealthy victorians to escape the cold dust of the city using Jason's distinction jasmond is definitely

more suburb than Suburbia for one thing it's got pretty good public transport cuz in Newcastle we have something called the tin and we Metro which I suppose Americans would call a Subway and londoners would call the overground it's a train line it runs somewhere just behind me over here it goes all the way into the City and for some reason in 2011 the BBC decided to make a musical about [Music] it yeah Hamilton I'm listening to the tin and we Metro musical son but jasmond is not where I grew up I was raised in Suburbia

the other half of Jason's distinction much further out of town so like he said my family were very car dependent we stayed in the same house for my whole childhood and the neighborhood definitely Got Roots here around us As I Grew having a keen sense of justice from an early age I asked about this and I was told that our family were lucky so we should always be kind to those less fortunate and help them whenever we could that's actually why I started philosophy tube to give away my education for free so the place that

I was raised shaped my subjectivity shaped who I became but I can't help but wonder who I might have become had I known from the start that places like that exist not alongside those less fortunate but like Jason said because others are less fortunate and really fortune and chance might not be the right language to use I wasn't just lucky to be raised in Suburbia I was privileged and to understand the difference let's go somewhere else welcome to Forest Gate in muum this is London the city I live in now Forest Gate is not my

neighborhood don't worry I'm not about to tell the internet where I live but it is the subject of a very interesting book terraformed by Joy white this is a book about gentrification Forest Gate has historically been a pretty poor area and in her book Joy white gives a potted history of the neighborhood it got the bombed out of it in World War II and then it was hit hard by de-industrialization and austerity in contrast to where I grew up it's also pretty racially diverse after the war a lot of black and South Asian people were

encouraged to move here from all over over the British Empire and later the Commonwealth it's also been a hotbed for racist Violence by white supremacist gangs and the Metropolitan Police but I repeat myself that mix of people and influences helped newm create a new kind of music this is one of the neighborhoods where Grime was born and today storm is probably the most well-known Grime artist he was the first to get an album to number one but it was young black people from neighborhoods like this one who invented and popularized the genre if you're watching

the YouTube version of this video then this is where I would play you some Grime music but YouTube's copyright scanners won't let me even though it is fair use but if you're watching the nebula version then you get to listen to some Grime now white says it's really no surprise that neighborhoods like newm would generate this kind of creativity she writes that through gr black youth can take on a new identity as an artist a performer or an entrepreneur in a socioecon landscape that is beset by racism and inequality this emancipatory aspect cannot be ignored

making music allows these young men to respond to the racial Terror of black lives lived under occupation it enables them to resist in multiple ways the marginal roles that have been mapped out for them today nuum is being regenerated which is to say gentrified so let's talk about what that actually involves I'm going to start by giving you the easy version and then I'm going to kick it up a notch white people including me might think of gentrification as mainly an economic thing price of rent goes up the price of coffee goes up a lot

of trendy bars get built in places like this with exposed brick exposed brick is my profile name on grinder and to understand that aspect of it I read this the city authentic by David Banks Banks asks if you're a city in the Modern Age and you want investment to help you grow how do you go about getting it in centuries prior you might have gotten uh an industrialist to open a textile mill or a car factory in your town but these days a lot of those manufacturing jobs have been globalized out to China and the

Philippines where wages are lower and unless it somehow becomes profitable again those sorts of investors ain't coming back so instead you have to mount giant wheels to your city and start moving around consuming smaller cities and static settlements until eventually we'll consume the Stars themselves mun Municipal Darwinism Mr natsworthy the finest system in the world I'm kidding Banks says the city has to become a brand if you can convince people that your area is unique and authentic bursting with special character then there's money to be made he calls this authenticity pedaling or cultural commodification and

really what a lot of it comes down to is digital marketing aimed at real estate developers and business owners or as they prefer to call themselves these days entrepreneurs and Bank says this strategy does very little to improve the lives of the people actually living there when an area does get regenerated a lot of the actual money goes to those entrepreneurs so people who own businesses local Elites get richer as an area realigns itself to suit the interests of businesses rather than people and it's self-defeating according to geographer David Harvey Gent gentrification undermines itself part

of the appeal of moving to a gentrifying neighborhood is low rent but the more it gentrifies the more landlords raise the rent the area caters more and more to middleclass Residents until eventually even they can't afford to be there anymore the small businesses owned by those local Elites get gobbled up by the big businesses that they helped bring in until the only people who can afford to be there are the big corporate chains and at that point the unique authentic area becomes exactly like everyone where else and at this point let's just pause and ask

a really obvious question why spend money on regenerating a High Street to attract entrepreneurs instead of just investing it in the people already living there why Court gentrification when we know that it's bad and really this is the same sort of question that comes up a lot in our society like why spend money on bombs rather than Healthcare why are Saudi Arabia trying to build a massive impossible luxury City in the desert rather than doing literally anything else and David Harvey has an answer to that too Urban Development turns money into capital capital is money

that generates more money an investment that gives you returns so why spend money on bombs rather than healthcare because it's profitable why spend money on businesses rather than people because it's profitable capitalism is a system in which things are done because they generate profit not necessarily because anybody needs or wants them and that Dynamic affects the development of entire cities let us look more closely at what capitalists do they begin the day with a certain amount of money and ends the day with more of it the next day they wake up and have to decide

what to do with the extra money they gained the day before they face a fian dilemma reinvest to get even more money or consume their Surplus away in Pleasures the coercive laws of competition force them to reinvest because if one does not reinvest then another surely will to remain a capitalist some Surplus must be reinvested to make even more Surplus but all of that is only part of the picture because Joy white says we should also understand gentrification as a form of slow racial violence parts of the neighborhood like the High Street get invested in

but other parts like the bits where predominantly black families actually live don't when developers brand neum as a nice place to live they erase the nasty parts of its history like the racist violence which gives the impression that the pain of those communities isn't worth remembering and they aren't an authentic part of the area they also don't talk about the actually unique culture like Grime because that would involve showing the unequal conditions that Inspire that kind of music instead they talk about the delies the new coffee shops the exposed brick and those things require disposable

income to access time was the UK invested in things like youth centers with recording equipment where people could go and do things like invent Grime music nowadays thanks to austerity a lot of that is gone so if you want to participate in the community now you need money you might remember on the last episode of philosophy tube I talked about a sociologist called Melinda Cooper who says house prices have gotten so high that these days if you want to earn a home you basically have to come from a wealthy family well what writers like white

and others point out is that police violence against people of color ruptures families and makes it that much harder for them to accumulate wealth putting it simply if someone in your family is arrested or deported they aren't earning so police violence and housing are actually one issue that intersects right here in Forest Gate sometimes this racial violence is really Stark for example scholar bernardet atahan studied the city of Detroit between 2009 and 2015 and found that the city artificially inflated the value of a lot of houses and raised property taxes on them resulting in around

100,000 homes being foreclosed on for nonpayment of tax this happened primarily in poor black neighborhoods and was completely illegal but most of the people targeted didn't have the resources to hire a lawyer essentially their homes were stolen from them by local government the stolen homes were then sold at auction and snapped up by developers gentrification at its least subtle and police violence is inseparable from this because atahan says this same process is also carried out through civil asset forfeiture and fines that are disproportionately dished out to black people at this point I'd like to shout

out a great video essay from a smaller Creator on this topic Frank laundry's video the the US will never build walkable cities goes into amazing detail on the racial violence of gentrification in the US Frank shows that when neighborhoods like Brooklyn reorient themselves towards wealthier residents this comes at a huge cost to the people already there in these ways Joy white says gentrification creates expanding pockets of whiteness the neighborhood gets nicer but the people who actually made it into a neighborhood in the first place get and now that we have a handle on Forest Gate

as an example of that we are ready to talk about one of the most famous books in urban studies and the 2002 movie phone booth phone booth is a 2002 Thriller starring Colin farell Kea Southerland Forest Whitaker R Mitchell and ktie Holmes Farrell plays a guy called Stu a phony baloney publicist who gets trapped in a phone boo in New York City by a sniper threatening to shoot him if he hangs up nice trial got to hell I really like it it has a stage play vibe to the premise that appeals to me it was

written by a guy called Larry Cohen no relation to the Cohen Brothers who also wrote another Thriller in 2004 called cellular damn guess he was really hung up on this idea what I want to zoom in on though is that the film takes place specifically in Midtown Manhattan at 53rd and 8th 10 minutes walk from times Square this is Time Square red Time Square Blue by Samuel R Delaney it was published in 1999 and it's one of the most famous books about gentrification specifically the gentrification of Times Square nowadays Times Square is a tourist destination

there's Billboards and an Olive Garden and a Swanky hotel where I hooked up with my ex one time all of that stuff Delaney calls Time Square red but from the 60s till the '90s Time Square Square was famous for smut there was pornographic movie theaters sex workers and a lot of public gay sex which Delaney remembers fondly it was a workingclass area and if middle class people were there they were there to party all of that stuff Delany calls Time Square blue also in Time Square red you can catch Cipher but in Time Square blue

you could catch magma Delany says that the Time Square of old facilitated contact between people of different social and economic classes especially in the porno theaters but the new Time Square doesn't really allow for that by making it familyfriendly which really means tourist friendly which really means you've got to have money in order to be there it has become a class segregated space just like what's happening in newm right now and in Delaney's academic opinion this sucks it used to be cool and gay the Old Time Square in 42nd Street was an entertainment area catering

largely to the working classes who lived in the city the middle class Andor tourists were invited to come along and watch or participate if that indeed was their thing the new Time Square is envisioned as predominantly a middle class area for entertainment to which the working classes are welcome to come along observe and take part in if they can pay and are willing to blend in Delaney says the design of a place incentivizes different kinds of interaction actions and in so doing creates different kinds of subjectivities and he draws an interesting distinction between two kinds

of interaction contact and networking contact is less structured it can happen unexpectedly and across different social classes for example when I moved into the building that I live in now I bumped into the hot guy who lives upstairs and he helped me move in a bunch of my stuff and now whenever I bake cookies or cakes I share them with him sometimes contact is a conversation in a stairwell sometimes it's anonymous gay sex in a public toilet Delaney says that contact makes life nicer and it also creates neighborhoods because it turns people who live near

each other into Neighbors in phone booth Stu is a guy whose whole life is networking he lies to his clients cheats on his wife abuses his assistant strings along his girlfriend with promises he'll make her a star and even when he's threatened by the sniper he responds by offering to become his publicist I've never done anything for anybody who couldn't do something for me we could read stew as an embodiment of the kind of subjectivity brought into existence by the newly gentrified Midtown remember how in newm austerity has limited people's chances to hang out without

spending money well Delany says when that happens people not only lose the ability to make contact with others they also learn to desire it less the more it costs to hang out the Chooser we get about who we hang out with a park with no public eating spaces restaurants or small item shopping on his borders forces mothers who live adjacent to it and who thus use it the most to share everything or nothing in terms of offering facilities or bathroom use or the occasional cup of coffee to other mothers and their children who use the

park but do not live so near because the local mothers feel they must offer these favors to whomever they are even civil with since such services are not publicly available they soon become extremely choosy and clickish about who they will even speak to the feel of the park becomes exclusive and snobbish and uncomfortable and inconvenient for mothers who in Carriage dress or race or class do not fit a rigid social pattern the YouTuber Elliot sang made a great video essay on this called nowhere to go the loss of third places he starts out noting that

gen Z is apparently facing an epidemic of loneliness which he says is caused in part by the increasing cost of just hanging out in public when public space becomes the exclusive playground of the wealthy everyone else gets isolated and dependent on digital Community instead I've heard it said that gen Z are having less sex than previous generations and one thing I've never heard anybody mention as a potential cause is a lot of young people can't afford to live anywhere except with their parents and at the same time dating has become more expensive indeed Delaney says

that's exactly what happened in Times Square similarly if every sexual encounter involves bringing someone back to your house the general sexual activity in the city becomes anxiety filled class bound and choosy this is precisely why public restrooms peep shows sex movies bars with grope rooms and parks with enough Greenery are necessary for a relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere and a democratic Metropolis you don't necessarily have to think everybody should be shagging in public toilets all the time but delany's General point is the same one we learned at the start about Army towns the design of

our environments shapes our subjectivities are jenz a bunch of Peres or do their attitudes about sex reflect their material conditions but still you might say that the new Time Square is safer especially safer for women but Delan considers this and he says it's not really safer for the women who were living there is it cuz they've all been forced to move if it is safer now for middle class women which is debatable then that has come at the cost of making it more dangerous for workingclass women especially sex workers if you've been watching this show

for a long time you might remember an old episode that we did on sex work back when the show was presented by my brother in that episode we learned that making women safer in the context of public policy usually means more cops and that usually means more police violence inflicted on sex workers in this way we can see that gentrification isn't just a form of racial violence it's also a form of misogynist and quer phobic violence too Delan says the new Time Square doesn't represent safety it represents conformity in fact he thinks that a lot

of the time when people talk about crime and danger in public spaces they aren't really talking about those things they're actually doing something else and I can give you a great example from my own life a while ago I was having dinner with a handful of Brits and one American from Seattle and one of the Brits asked a question is Seattle a clean City well like a lot of places we have a big homeless problem now strictly speaking that response is a non-secretor that's like if I asked you what's the weather like in Sydney and

you said my pantaloons are full of eels the American did not answer the question unless homeless people themselves are a kind of dirt and obviously that's not the case every human being is precious and unique and worth exactly the same as every other homeless people may have dirt on them they may have rubbish or waste that they leave lying around but that's because they are denied a place to wash or dispose of their waste and perhaps the speaker meant to say that because there are a lot of homeless people in Seattle they leave their waste

lying around and it the waste is what makes the city dirty but if that's what they were going for then it would have been more accurate to say we the people of Seattle some of whom are homeless and some of whom are not have a housing and waste disposal problem so given that the answer doesn't make sense why was it said well David Harvey says that although gentrification does require the violence of casting some people out we prefer not to think about that cuz it makes us feel bad interclass contact summons up all kinds of

anxieties which we prefer to Simply banish by sending homeless people away there is a lot of content on YouTube that dehumanizes homeless people thought slime recently made this excellent video exposing some of it the instinct to Simply send them away obviously requires violence to carry out there are politicians who promise to crack down on homelessness licensing police to confiscate people's belongings or even put them in camps videos like the one thought slime exposes build consent for those kinds of violent policies by dehumanizing the people at the sharpend and they do that by playing on people's

anxieties I hasten to add that the American in this conversation wasn't an oil Baron or a slum Lord but a queer woman and a Democrat she's someone that I know well and love dearly and she graciously gave me permission to use this example she herself experienced homelessness some years ago and like a lot of people who came up from poverty retains the fear of being sent back to it so what I think happened in this exchange was an anxiety about interclass contact got expressed as an anxiety about hygiene a fear of precarity of possibly being

made homeless again was projected onto the bodies of people currently experiencing homelessness rendering them almost infectious in the mind of the speaker as if merely by seeing them or having to interact with them she might become homeless again herself as if they had dirt on them in them that could be transferred indelibly to her and obviously that's not possible that anxiety however deeply felt simply does not correspond to reality homeless people per se are nothing to be afraid of they can't turn you into one of them in fact the people who can make you homeless

probably own several homes they're just poor they're not zombies this whole discussion about anxiety and projection is what we in the screenwriting business call foreshadowing remember this when we get to the twist the violence inflicted on Stu in phone booth is a reflection of the violence required to create people like him in the first place his desire to isolate himself in a world of class homogenized networking comes at a cost to the people he treats like dirt he wants to limit the contact he has with others and he is punished ironically by getting trapped in

a glass Booth with only a hostile voice to talk to the film could have been set anywhere but I think it's a strong artistic choice to make it specifically one of the last public phone booths in Midtown Manhattan surprise that wasn't foreshadowing because it's time for the twist right now here's where I'm going to tell you not only what this video is really about but also what the next couple episodes of philosophy tube are going to be themed around around you see we've learned a lot of interesting facts about Urban Development but none of those

facts matter if you're one of the people caught up in the conspiracy theory about 15minute [Music] cities in reality 15minute City are a fashionable Concept in Urban Design being tried in lots of places the idea is that everything you need in your neighborhood from Health Care to Leisure to education should all be within 15 minutes walk or cycle that'd be some advantages to that like reducing car dependency and making neighborhoods nicer and some criticisms nicer neighborhoods could be a cover for gentrification as we saw in newm but that's all in in reality and we are

leaving reality far behind in February 2023 protesters gathered in the center of Oxford to shout about 15minute cities they said that a pledge by Oxfordshire County Council to consider 15minute cities as a planning goal was really a conspiracy to imprison people take away their cars and enslave SL depopulate the Earth as part of agenda 2030 or the great reset a fictional plan by the UN which includes faking climate change faking Corona virus trans people digital currencies Greta thunberg critics of Andrew Tate the committee of 300 which also doesn't exist 5G drag queens antifa the US

election the Brazilian election CLA Schwab and just stop oil thousands of people took took to the streets to shout about these unconnected and largely nonsensical topics I tried to get some footage of that protest to show you but many of the sources I can find are far-right media organizations and I didn't want to give them exposure if you'd like to listen to some of those protesters actual words though the source I'd recommend is the work of sociologist Anie Kelly who interviewed some of them for the podcast Q andon Anonymous the full episode is 2 and

1/2 hours long because many of the people she spoke to in Oxford have verbal diarrhea sliding from one unconnected topic to another and vomiting so much disinformation it would honestly take days to explain every way in which they are wrong so my question is what happened to these people's minds philosophy tube is now 11 years old and having made educational content for over a decade I've realized there's a problem some people don't want to be educated some people are committed to ignorance so committed that they will give up their money their relationship with their loved

ones and even their connection to reality to maintain that ignorance they are caught in fantasms fantasm is a technical philosophy term it's a way of mentally organizing feelings selective observations and misre representations a way of interpreting the world but also does things to the person using it in a way it's like looking at the world through a prism they've been discussed by a few philosophers including dereda laon and lanch but I first encountered the idea in Judith Butler's new book who's afraid of gender it's about fantasms and transphobia and I'll be doing a video on

it later this year but for now I'll explain fantasms with orig original examples so for example medicine son Frontier Doctors Without Borders are a humanitarian charity currently working in Gaza on the 3rd of December 2023 they tweeted that Israeli tanks had targeted cars marked with the msf logo and in response British journalist David Kier accused msf of protecting Hamas acting as Hamas agents and enabling the horrific terrorist attack of October 7th now whatever you think about the conflict we must surely agree that literally speaking Ker's claims are false msf does not do any of those

things I mean unless he has some truly stunning evidence to the contrary so if it's not true why did he say it is he just mistaken well he is mistaken but to understand fantasms we have to go beyond true and false philosopher Michael nass says fantasms refract an as if into an as so for example this makes me feel as if msf or Hamas becomes they are 15 minute cities make me feel as if the government is trying to control me becomes they are the presence of a transperson in a public bathroom makes me feel

as if I'm under attack becomes I am your feelings are refracted through the fantasm and projected out onto reality if you listen to conspiracy theorists you'll quickly notice that the things they say don't make sense for example the ones Annie Kelly interviewed say that the 15-minute cities conspiracy is communist but also that it's being done by the world economic Forum one of the most capitalist organizations there is a lot of the protesters Associated cars with freedom and traffic calming or procycling policies with surveillance and and tyranny but this too is completely backwards the YouTube channel

o the urbanity has a great video on this in which they point out that if you want to drive a car you need a photo license from the government and a number plate that can be traced to you and modern cars Harvest a lot of personal data because they're filled with computers you know what doesn't do that feet it doesn't make sense but fantasms aren't supposed to according to Butler people Loy fantasms when they feel anxious but not the kind of anxiety that you get from drinking too much coffee the kind you get when you're

in danger of believing something that would force you to reassess who you are for example at time of recording I am not a vegetarian if I looked into industrial meat production then I might form the belief that eating meat is morally wrong and if I believed that my subjectivity would have to change my relationship with my family and my hometown which is very centered around meat-based traditional recipes would have to change my relationship with my body would definitely change and I don't want that I am anxious about forming that belief and so I try to

avoid it usually by just not thinking about the topic but if I was compelled to think about it then to protect my subjectivity I might deploy a fantasm according to literature Professor Darren tenv fantasms allow the user to stand on both sides of a contradiction and protect themselves against cognitive dissonance for example funerals are an exercise in fantasm we treat the Dead with reverence we consider what they would have wanted and imagine what we would want to happen to our own remains and all of that allows us to imagine the dead as both gone and

in a way still with us that's a contradiction it doesn't make sense but we do it anyway and the fantasm contains that contradiction it is not that people are unmindful of the contradiction and need to be enlightened no the contradiction itself is what works in effect emancipating people from the task of developing a rational position for this reason fantasms are also about power in that they allow the user to think the unthinkable to contain the contradictions that would otherwise threaten their subjectivity fantasms give the user a false sense of Mastery over that which they refuse

to understand for this reason conspiracy theories often attract people who feel powerless and tell them that they are important there is a Sinister plan going on behind the scenes but you Brave Warrior for truth are standing your ground and will surely help liberate Humanity so what kinds of anxieties and contradictions are contained by the 15-minute City conspiracies I think we can see the answer really clearly when members of government use the fantasm in 2023 British transport secretary Mark Harper said 15minute cities are a Sinister plan to remove people's freedoms our energy Minister Andrew Bowie concurred

conservative MP Nick Fletcher said that they were the first step to taking away people's freedom and even prime minister Rishi sunak said there is a Relentless attack on motorists none of that is real there is no such attack there is no such plan what is real is that the United Kingdom has big problems with development according to this report by over a dozen academics deregulation cuts to local planning departments and the commodification of housing mean that when development is done in my country it serves the interests of private corporations not the people and we already

saw this with the section we did on gentrification the result is a planning system that is wasteful corrupt and doesn't meet our need for climate resilient affordable buildings we used to have a hospital now we have luxury Flats these problems are systemic caused by a system of behaviors and practices that like your hometown shapes the subjectivities of the people who live under it many people are invested sometimes literally but always psychologically in the system in which we live and yet at the same time they see the problems they know something has to be done but

the solutions are Unthinkable to be blunt if you're a conservative housing Minister you cannot allow yourself to think that the policies you support are the problem because if you believe that you'll have a identity crisis this is the contradiction that the fantasm contains two things result from extended fantasm use the first is the person trapped in the fantasm doesn't examine where their initial anxieties came from why does the idea of a 15-minute City make you feel as if the government is is trying to control you why does the idea of a transperson in a public

bathroom make you feel as if you were under attack when did you first start worrying about that and why these sorts of questions will not occur to someone who is trapped in a fantasm they occurred to me though so I read this report from The Institute of strategic dialogue exploring exactly where this conspiracy theory started and how it spread online turns out it began with right-wing think tanks funded by fossil fuel companies pushing the myth of climate lockdown to turn people against Green politics by the time those people took to the streets in Oxford they'd

already started powering the fantasm with their own desperate anxieties but the seed was planted by explicit climate deniers those people weren't just daed they'd fallen into a mental trap and yes that is also my profile name on grinder since those protesters are worried about having their freedoms restricted it's worth asking whose freedoms are actually restricted we opened this video noting that migrants working on British Farms are tightly controlled possibly enslaved seemingly with the government's knowledge British governments imprison people without trial in detention centers and on offshore barges they want to deport people to Rwanda for

seeking Asylum and maybe actually confiscate people's property simply for being homeless all of that is far more tyrannical than a traffic filter here we see the second effect of fantasms they justify actions that otherwise wouldn't be if the government really are trying to imprison you using 15minute cities then protesting makes sense and all that other stuff is kind of small beans if trans people really are trying to attack you in public bathrooms then excluding us makes sense if msf really are Hamas then open fire this is what allows fantasms to be used as a tool

for political Recruitment and as luck would have it I found my very own example in the wild this Twitter account which I won't name because I don't want to give them exposure Brands itself as being against Boston mayor Michelle woo as well as tweets about mayor woo the account is also routinely transphobic xenophobic Pro and anti Palestine it says that bike lanes and traffic calming measures are woke and that prioritizing cars would be much better but look this is clearly photoshopped like that that's not possible how are you going to fit six Lanes of traffic

in here are these clown cars this guy's been in an accident that's got his whole vehicle over on one side could be worse though this guy's been cut in half have you tried driving through Boston I've done it twice with like two different partners and both times it nearly ended our relationship if you removed this section where i93 crosses the pike the Massachusetts divorce rate would have accounts like this can be found on almost every social media platform the mishmash of nonsensical positions provide several onramps to the world of the fantasm whatever your anxiety is

there's a place for you in unreality if you don't like driving in Boston then maybe that frustration can be channeled into a dislike of cyclists or Lefty vegans if you enjoy laughing at traffic wokeness maybe you'll also like to own the libs by adopting a conservative position on gun control or trans rights or foreign policy if you agree that the city is being ruined by traffic calming measures maybe you'll also agree that it's being ruined by anyone who isn't white this is an Amazon recommendation algorithm for radicalization its function is to build a political Coalition

by loosening your grip on reality one fingernail at a time and if it made sense it would be less effective at doing that this leads us to a crucial Insight the Oxford protesters that Twitter account and the queer Democrat at dinner exist on a spectrum the distance between conspiracy theory and polite liberal discourse about homelessness is a matter of degree not kind you and I are not immune to fantasms so what can we do about all this well there are some solutions to our Urban Development and gentrification crisis that report that I mentioned earlier recommends

things like reforming our tax system reversing austerity maybe getting rid of the British aristocracy who still control a lot of our land when you live in Practical reality there are practical steps that you can take and whole channels like not just bikes dedicated to talking about them ultimately a lot of it comes down to making public investment so I guess we should be grateful the solutions are so simple but what about all the people in the fantasm can we get them out how do educate people who refuse to learn well that is the subject of

our next episode and between now and then I'm cooking something else I have written a short film and it just got greenlit it explores many of the same things that we've talked about today like how do you get somebody to realize something that they really don't want to know it's about two women dealing with the troll traa they got from a bad relationship and they're both vampires because their ex is Count Dracula we are going to be filming in a few weeks time in Hollywood it's only recently sunk in for me this is the real

thing that's actually going to happen uh I am going to be in the film and starring alongside me will be Morana ignis and Brandon Rogers from hasbin hotel and hell of a boss to of the biggest shows in the world right now and if you would like to see the film when it comes out there's a link in the dooblydoo already go. nebula.com service called nebula and what they're hoping for is that people sign up to nebula to watch the film that's how they make back the budget that they gave us but since we announced

it so many of you have signed up that we've already made the budget back my debut film as a screen writer is making profit before we've even started rolling that's amazing and even better rather than just pocket that money nebula decided to reinvest it so they increased the budget and gave that money to the creative artists so we can make an even higher quality film and even better if you sign up to nebula using that link specifically I get a cut of your subscription so you'd be helping out philosophy tube and my weird acting Ventures

thing at the same time genuinely I can't tell you how nice it is to be working with producers who actually care about Independent Media and new writers not just who say they do because everyone says that they do but who actually do NE though are even letting me keep the rights to the film so it's not like Netflix where you write a thing and then they cancel it after two seasons and you can't do anything I own Dracula's ex-girlfriend like the rights to it stay with me that is also a radically new way of producing

film and it's kind of a GameChanger so wish me luck on set and thanks for [Music] watching going home was always easy see my friends and ra Late July drunk at your party and cut my eye and kiss to spell 100° that tesas heat oh you and me we fell in deep and hot is the temperature hold my breath to December now it's 29 and when I time and I don't know if what we had this summer last another night if I don't hold I get hot now every time I see those Texas lights you

know wor my heart when you were close but now it's cold and getting C [Music] in now the city is frozen under and I can't see the Texas Sun see my breath that makes me wonder if I'm about to come on cuz I know the scene it's hard to believe that you came to me but damn it was easy don't you remember what you said in September now it's 29 in Amarillo when a time and I don't know if what we had this summer lasts another night if I don't hold yeah I get hot now

every time I see those Texas lights you know wor my heart when you were close but now it's cold and getting in now the city's lost its power with the frost and snow I'm just counting down the hours cuz I can't let you go CU it's 29 and when I time and I don't know if what we had this summer lasts another night if I don't hold yeah I get hot now every time I see those Texas lights you know on my heart when you were close but now it's cold [Music] [Music] and [Music] Latin

60 stations in location