Scary stuff for someone of such a hermit-like temperament as myself. I live as far out in the sticks as I can afford. I need space and privacy to be comfortable. A "15 minute city" sounds too much like a plantation with workers' dorms where you can never get out of sight of your place in society. And the limits on the places you can visit is not the worst aspect. Surely this will come with a limiting effect on intellect and aspirations as well. Which I worry is the ultimate goal of the 15 minute city concept.
I grew up in Minneapolis city proper. That was my old neighborhood you saw burning.
My wife grew up in the very deep burbs.
Our first 15 years together we did some urban pioneering. Trying to make a difference. Oh silly us.
We had a really nice condo in a 19th century brown stone 4 plex. We spent $40K on it, and ended up selling it for $11K . Trust me, in a decent neighborhood, it was a $100K condo.
We moved to the deep burbs on 5 acers of land and lake shore. This city kid has no desire to go back. Our horses are out our window. Our deck overlooks the lake. In our thriving metropolis we have a Walmart and a Target - much less than 15 mins away. If I can't find what I want there, Amazon is usually pretty quick.
We have a resident bard owl pair on the bay. Those guys can make noises like howler monkeys. In the spring we get scads of migrating waterfowl. 50 or more Snowy Egrets spend their nights in a tree across the bay. The biologist who used to live next door is the woman who reintroduced the swans, which are now - at least around here -as common as Canadian Geese. Yesterday a company of wild turkey marched by on patrol. Trust me, the list of birds that visit our various feeders would be long, but I will throw a shout out to the pileated woodpecker that stops by from time to time. Nice hair cut pal.
It was nice being able to make easy use of season tickets to the Ballet, and the Guthrie, and the rest of the positive culture in the city. It is better not to have to worry about riots, car jackings, and stolen catalytic converters.
When we ride our horses, we prefer places that are more remote and less developed than the gravel roads around the house. Even our home is a little to civilized to feel really free. We are quite disinclined to domestication.
Disinclination to domestication goes hand in hand, I think, with seeing the harm in "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings." Wildness can be dangerous. Unexpected. That is part of the value in it.
Thank you for sharing some of your life, through words, here. I appreciate it.
You are right. We who grew up before bike helmets - and survived - aren't into safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other such dribble. A bit of wild is still in many of us, calling. If we listen hard, many of us can still hear it.
Seatbelts, even! And could walk ourselves to school at five or six. It’s a worrying direction our culture is going in, I saw the shift beginning in the 90s especially. So glad I was able to raise free range kids in Alaska, where the stakes could get high very quickly, depending on which wild life managed to show up in your sphere. It tends to create capable and clever adults… who love a bit of adventure
Love his mohawk. I don't know if we have any nighthawks or not. I wish we did. We have a small number of bats and a few swallow's. I love any of these guys who keep the mosquito population down. I'd like to know why I've never had woodies move into the wood duck houses I put up years ago. They do come through every spring.
I don't think woodies nest in the spring. I have only seen them nest in winter. North Florida has a resident population of them that hang out all year.
As someone who makes limited use of mobility as a matter of choice (2 tanks of gas a year for the past three years) and generally does not feel a need or interest in bustling about, I am appalled by the 15 minute city.
Everything you need is less than 15 minutes away? Everything? Who decides what I need? What if I change my mind? What if ...
I can choose to live somewhere that I think convenient and safe and appealing enough and affordable ... for me. No reason to think you'd agree. What if my friend has different tastes and appetites? and lives 27 minutes away? Scratch them off the list.
The root of all this is some exercise of the imagination by a fevered brain that believes that what it imagines will be just as delightful for everyone else. No data, just diktat backed by unnamed force.
I started watching surveillance systems be implemented in my neighborhood in 2020. I pointed it out to several people who thought I was just being overly concerned because they are not paying attention nor reading as much as I am.
I knew in 2020 when the Covid hysteria started, that this was some thing I needed to learn about as much as possible, so I spent about 12 hours a day reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts about the agenda.
Many large 5G towers were also installed while we were on a brief lockdown and most of the street lights now have cameras on them.
In 2022, before I moved out of that neighborhood, they installed Smart City kiosks, which no one I spoke to noticed either. People are sleepwalking while surveillance systems are going up all around us. I learned by looking up the name of the kiosks, that they were given to the city of Miami for free and that they are part of a smart city program that Miami signed up for a few years ago.
Yes. I heard that at a health conference in 2021 from one of the speakers. I believe that is the agenda but I still have hope we can turn it around as people start realizing what is taking place.
yea, and its still worse than you think. I Have a customer building /selling smart kiosks to replace static maps in malls and bus stops. These have recognition systems. So if they can't identified you by several wireless electronic means, they can at least do facial recognition. They compare to the FBIs most wanted and a few other similar sites, and if nothing else they'll put you into a sex and age group bucket and throw an advertisement at you. It's all for the better right?
I knew it was for mass surveillance when I saw it. Between the kiosks, 5G towers and traffic light cameras, we will be spied on 24/7, even more than we are now.
I live in Seattle where an activist I know is all gung ho on 15 minute cities. But to him it's all about good local transit and services (including grocery stores), things that would strongly benefit poorer communities. Never heard of the things you're talking about. We also support transit-oriented development rather than car-oriented. Many young people really like this. Safety for walkers and cyclists is also a big issue, hence slowing traffic. Two bad car accidents right outside my door two days ago - I suspect speeding and poor visibility.
What you talk about here was basically the extent of what I had heard until a few days ago. And I am all for enhancing transit and making cities more walkable and bikeable (I have been a bicyclist all of my adult life, and through a combination of luck and skill have not been in an accident in traffic, but I know that it is not *just* skill: bike in a city for long enough, and something bad is likely to happen).
However, most of the starry-eyed do-gooders haven't thought through what all must be sacrificed to attain a few ideals which may not even be central to a good life.
Lifelong cyclist who never had a traumatic experience on a bike? I'm superstitious enough to worry about that on your behalf even though I know better. Not my experience, for sure. I'm a bit proud of every crash that I walked away from but you sort of have to be, after the fact. Stay alert!
Jan 25, 2023·edited Jan 25, 2023Liked by Heather Heying
Ah, it's always "safety" and "benefit the poor." Such altruistic intentions. They envision Tribeca, communities all similar, with a Trader Joes, pretty little artisan boutiques and a Starbucks, and probably no porn, homeless, or litter. They'll get a ghetto (ghetto, formerly a street, or quarter, of a city set apart as a legally enforced residence area, or a group or activity that exists separately from everyone else.) Do they imagine these beautiful and sterile 15 minute communities will be centrally planned, built and operated? Do they imagine it will all magically be cooperative? Have they ever seen such a thing accomplished, and if so, how many poor people reside there? Does it occur to them that ghetto is the natural state of such things?
"Never heard of the things you're talking about." An understandable inner-city perspective that perhaps is influenced by serious problems that supersede, and/or are already normalized to, issues of surveillance and already have income-induced restrictions of access. That is certainly real and addressable with some '15-minute' concepts, but hopefully not the ones that make permanent and legally punitive the institutionalization of surveillance and restricted access. And one would hope that you are not going to paint those who are not in this situation as elitist if they object to these measures being universally imposed.
The longer I live, the more I don't want to live in a city. I visited the Big Bend area last year. I'd never been to such a remote place and it felt life-giving. Cities have their perks, but getting out of them sure feels good.
Ease tends to breed complacency. Challenge, struggle and even failure can breed innovation and problem solving… turns out our brains actually learn better from mistakes. I will never be comfortable with a nanny state, or a conscripted environment meant to keep me safe from my own beautiful mistakes
When my wife and I go into town we sometimes take the bus. We present our passes to be scanned so that the local authority / Welsh Assembly Govt knows who we are and where we are going. And the same happens when we go back home. But if it's a nice day we choose to walk or cycle the five miles. Leave our phones on the kitchen table and pay for our coffee and cake with cash. Still if someone wanted to know what we were up to they could download the camera footage. Sad but true.
Heather! Welcome to our atomized-libertarian club. I'll email you the secret handshake.
In defense of the devil, there probably is a tradeoff between the sense 0f community and people's practical ability to access different amenities. Even finding love is like this -- people will have stronger roots in towns where most people marry their hometown sweethearts. Public policy that favours the communitarian side of this tradeoff is not inherently evil.
What is evil is the mindset which places a vision for society above the rights of the people who have to live in it. This is where Covid entrenched bad habits in our polities. The inevitable outgrowth of that mindset is a push for coercive big-brotherism like this. I people aren't kept on a short leash, they might enact those horrible rights of theirs.
Awesome analysis of this strange self imposed prison. As mobility is standing in for speed, so is efficiency for scarcity, convenience for confinement, freedom for safety, safety for control - this mindset collapses everything into poverty of space, people, ideas and things. As you have shared again and again in a myriad of ways (ty :) don't cede an inch, we know exactly where this goes.
Most people seem to have no idea how massive the tech surveillance state already is, let alone how it is evolving in response to what is called 'AI'. What it creates is a panopticon with no guards at all, just rules that enforce themselves on populations with no attempt made at any kind of oversight.
I watched a lecture from Tim Schultz, U.S. Naval War College Associate Dean of Academics, his attitude, what he is teaching students, paraphrasing 'hands and feet off the controls, just let the machines kill people, humans will be involved less and less, if you have to push a button to authorize killings just push it, you will never actually see the victims'
Mobility and accessibility, are not mutually exclusive. By all means, build cities with amenities close by. Most people will travel less, then. So if that truly is the goal, then there is will be no need to restrict movement. Perhaps the true goal is control.
That $hit will never fly in red states. The agenda to control and manipulate is so blatant that for us, it doesn't invoke fear - rather, a need to prepare to stand strong (rage against the machine, anyone?). The WEF megalomaniacs are pathetic in their overreaching power-grabs and attempts to generate greater divisions that will allow them to swoop in and take over. More polarization is in store - more reasons to deride one another. Until the dust settles, we'll be in for a wild ride. Until then:
The dissemination of misinformation is a prelude to the destabilization of the old-world order. This new environment, so goes the argument, relies on mistrust and fear. Makes us ripe for the picking as our malleable minds turn fearfully weak and paranoid, pathetically weepy and wantonly crazy.
Yes, that last bit is from one of my raps, written in 2012.
Scary stuff for someone of such a hermit-like temperament as myself. I live as far out in the sticks as I can afford. I need space and privacy to be comfortable. A "15 minute city" sounds too much like a plantation with workers' dorms where you can never get out of sight of your place in society. And the limits on the places you can visit is not the worst aspect. Surely this will come with a limiting effect on intellect and aspirations as well. Which I worry is the ultimate goal of the 15 minute city concept.
I grew up in Minneapolis city proper. That was my old neighborhood you saw burning.
My wife grew up in the very deep burbs.
Our first 15 years together we did some urban pioneering. Trying to make a difference. Oh silly us.
We had a really nice condo in a 19th century brown stone 4 plex. We spent $40K on it, and ended up selling it for $11K . Trust me, in a decent neighborhood, it was a $100K condo.
We moved to the deep burbs on 5 acers of land and lake shore. This city kid has no desire to go back. Our horses are out our window. Our deck overlooks the lake. In our thriving metropolis we have a Walmart and a Target - much less than 15 mins away. If I can't find what I want there, Amazon is usually pretty quick.
We have a resident bard owl pair on the bay. Those guys can make noises like howler monkeys. In the spring we get scads of migrating waterfowl. 50 or more Snowy Egrets spend their nights in a tree across the bay. The biologist who used to live next door is the woman who reintroduced the swans, which are now - at least around here -as common as Canadian Geese. Yesterday a company of wild turkey marched by on patrol. Trust me, the list of birds that visit our various feeders would be long, but I will throw a shout out to the pileated woodpecker that stops by from time to time. Nice hair cut pal.
It was nice being able to make easy use of season tickets to the Ballet, and the Guthrie, and the rest of the positive culture in the city. It is better not to have to worry about riots, car jackings, and stolen catalytic converters.
When we ride our horses, we prefer places that are more remote and less developed than the gravel roads around the house. Even our home is a little to civilized to feel really free. We are quite disinclined to domestication.
Disinclination to domestication goes hand in hand, I think, with seeing the harm in "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings." Wildness can be dangerous. Unexpected. That is part of the value in it.
Thank you for sharing some of your life, through words, here. I appreciate it.
You are right. We who grew up before bike helmets - and survived - aren't into safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other such dribble. A bit of wild is still in many of us, calling. If we listen hard, many of us can still hear it.
Seatbelts, even! And could walk ourselves to school at five or six. It’s a worrying direction our culture is going in, I saw the shift beginning in the 90s especially. So glad I was able to raise free range kids in Alaska, where the stakes could get high very quickly, depending on which wild life managed to show up in your sphere. It tends to create capable and clever adults… who love a bit of adventure
Sounds like you made a good move. I wish I saw my piliateds more. But I wish I still had nighthawks. Cats are hard on ground nesting birds.
Love his mohawk. I don't know if we have any nighthawks or not. I wish we did. We have a small number of bats and a few swallow's. I love any of these guys who keep the mosquito population down. I'd like to know why I've never had woodies move into the wood duck houses I put up years ago. They do come through every spring.
I don't think woodies nest in the spring. I have only seen them nest in winter. North Florida has a resident population of them that hang out all year.
Stay in your pod, eat bugs, watch Netflix, vote for the Establishment, and you will be happy.
As someone who makes limited use of mobility as a matter of choice (2 tanks of gas a year for the past three years) and generally does not feel a need or interest in bustling about, I am appalled by the 15 minute city.
Everything you need is less than 15 minutes away? Everything? Who decides what I need? What if I change my mind? What if ...
I can choose to live somewhere that I think convenient and safe and appealing enough and affordable ... for me. No reason to think you'd agree. What if my friend has different tastes and appetites? and lives 27 minutes away? Scratch them off the list.
The root of all this is some exercise of the imagination by a fevered brain that believes that what it imagines will be just as delightful for everyone else. No data, just diktat backed by unnamed force.
I started watching surveillance systems be implemented in my neighborhood in 2020. I pointed it out to several people who thought I was just being overly concerned because they are not paying attention nor reading as much as I am.
I knew in 2020 when the Covid hysteria started, that this was some thing I needed to learn about as much as possible, so I spent about 12 hours a day reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts about the agenda.
Many large 5G towers were also installed while we were on a brief lockdown and most of the street lights now have cameras on them.
In 2022, before I moved out of that neighborhood, they installed Smart City kiosks, which no one I spoke to noticed either. People are sleepwalking while surveillance systems are going up all around us. I learned by looking up the name of the kiosks, that they were given to the city of Miami for free and that they are part of a smart city program that Miami signed up for a few years ago.
I am anticipating a Chinese style surveillance state to be implemented in the name of our "security".
Yes. I heard that at a health conference in 2021 from one of the speakers. I believe that is the agenda but I still have hope we can turn it around as people start realizing what is taking place.
I hope so. We need to be aware of what is going on. Freedoms given away may never be recovered.
Exactly!
yea, and its still worse than you think. I Have a customer building /selling smart kiosks to replace static maps in malls and bus stops. These have recognition systems. So if they can't identified you by several wireless electronic means, they can at least do facial recognition. They compare to the FBIs most wanted and a few other similar sites, and if nothing else they'll put you into a sex and age group bucket and throw an advertisement at you. It's all for the better right?
I knew it was for mass surveillance when I saw it. Between the kiosks, 5G towers and traffic light cameras, we will be spied on 24/7, even more than we are now.
I live in Seattle where an activist I know is all gung ho on 15 minute cities. But to him it's all about good local transit and services (including grocery stores), things that would strongly benefit poorer communities. Never heard of the things you're talking about. We also support transit-oriented development rather than car-oriented. Many young people really like this. Safety for walkers and cyclists is also a big issue, hence slowing traffic. Two bad car accidents right outside my door two days ago - I suspect speeding and poor visibility.
What you talk about here was basically the extent of what I had heard until a few days ago. And I am all for enhancing transit and making cities more walkable and bikeable (I have been a bicyclist all of my adult life, and through a combination of luck and skill have not been in an accident in traffic, but I know that it is not *just* skill: bike in a city for long enough, and something bad is likely to happen).
However, most of the starry-eyed do-gooders haven't thought through what all must be sacrificed to attain a few ideals which may not even be central to a good life.
Lifelong cyclist who never had a traumatic experience on a bike? I'm superstitious enough to worry about that on your behalf even though I know better. Not my experience, for sure. I'm a bit proud of every crash that I walked away from but you sort of have to be, after the fact. Stay alert!
Ah, it's always "safety" and "benefit the poor." Such altruistic intentions. They envision Tribeca, communities all similar, with a Trader Joes, pretty little artisan boutiques and a Starbucks, and probably no porn, homeless, or litter. They'll get a ghetto (ghetto, formerly a street, or quarter, of a city set apart as a legally enforced residence area, or a group or activity that exists separately from everyone else.) Do they imagine these beautiful and sterile 15 minute communities will be centrally planned, built and operated? Do they imagine it will all magically be cooperative? Have they ever seen such a thing accomplished, and if so, how many poor people reside there? Does it occur to them that ghetto is the natural state of such things?
Maybe it is a desire to live in their own minds: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2023/02/surviving-the-metaverse
"Never heard of the things you're talking about." An understandable inner-city perspective that perhaps is influenced by serious problems that supersede, and/or are already normalized to, issues of surveillance and already have income-induced restrictions of access. That is certainly real and addressable with some '15-minute' concepts, but hopefully not the ones that make permanent and legally punitive the institutionalization of surveillance and restricted access. And one would hope that you are not going to paint those who are not in this situation as elitist if they object to these measures being universally imposed.
The longer I live, the more I don't want to live in a city. I visited the Big Bend area last year. I'd never been to such a remote place and it felt life-giving. Cities have their perks, but getting out of them sure feels good.
Which "big bend"? Can't be the one in North Florida. Never heard it described as "remote" although most of it is comfortably rural.
West TX
Ease tends to breed complacency. Challenge, struggle and even failure can breed innovation and problem solving… turns out our brains actually learn better from mistakes. I will never be comfortable with a nanny state, or a conscripted environment meant to keep me safe from my own beautiful mistakes
When my wife and I go into town we sometimes take the bus. We present our passes to be scanned so that the local authority / Welsh Assembly Govt knows who we are and where we are going. And the same happens when we go back home. But if it's a nice day we choose to walk or cycle the five miles. Leave our phones on the kitchen table and pay for our coffee and cake with cash. Still if someone wanted to know what we were up to they could download the camera footage. Sad but true.
Heather! Welcome to our atomized-libertarian club. I'll email you the secret handshake.
In defense of the devil, there probably is a tradeoff between the sense 0f community and people's practical ability to access different amenities. Even finding love is like this -- people will have stronger roots in towns where most people marry their hometown sweethearts. Public policy that favours the communitarian side of this tradeoff is not inherently evil.
What is evil is the mindset which places a vision for society above the rights of the people who have to live in it. This is where Covid entrenched bad habits in our polities. The inevitable outgrowth of that mindset is a push for coercive big-brotherism like this. I people aren't kept on a short leash, they might enact those horrible rights of theirs.
Awesome analysis of this strange self imposed prison. As mobility is standing in for speed, so is efficiency for scarcity, convenience for confinement, freedom for safety, safety for control - this mindset collapses everything into poverty of space, people, ideas and things. As you have shared again and again in a myriad of ways (ty :) don't cede an inch, we know exactly where this goes.
Most people seem to have no idea how massive the tech surveillance state already is, let alone how it is evolving in response to what is called 'AI'. What it creates is a panopticon with no guards at all, just rules that enforce themselves on populations with no attempt made at any kind of oversight.
I watched a lecture from Tim Schultz, U.S. Naval War College Associate Dean of Academics, his attitude, what he is teaching students, paraphrasing 'hands and feet off the controls, just let the machines kill people, humans will be involved less and less, if you have to push a button to authorize killings just push it, you will never actually see the victims'
If I use less than my 15 minutes ration, can I monetize it and sell it?
That has value.
What is it worth?
Would it allow another to go from 15 to, say, 23?
What constraints take away is freedom lost?
What was it worth? How much did I lose?
We already have a large number of 15 minute communities in the US. And almost anyone can live there for free. We call them prisons.
Mobility and accessibility, are not mutually exclusive. By all means, build cities with amenities close by. Most people will travel less, then. So if that truly is the goal, then there is will be no need to restrict movement. Perhaps the true goal is control.
That $hit will never fly in red states. The agenda to control and manipulate is so blatant that for us, it doesn't invoke fear - rather, a need to prepare to stand strong (rage against the machine, anyone?). The WEF megalomaniacs are pathetic in their overreaching power-grabs and attempts to generate greater divisions that will allow them to swoop in and take over. More polarization is in store - more reasons to deride one another. Until the dust settles, we'll be in for a wild ride. Until then:
The dissemination of misinformation is a prelude to the destabilization of the old-world order. This new environment, so goes the argument, relies on mistrust and fear. Makes us ripe for the picking as our malleable minds turn fearfully weak and paranoid, pathetically weepy and wantonly crazy.
Yes, that last bit is from one of my raps, written in 2012.