the terminally online right's greatest new enemies: convenience and walking

Last year, social media's far right denizens were fuming about walkable cities and neighborhoods. They're still fuming to this day.

Folks, I regret to inform you that the web’s dumbest conspiracy theory is still alive and well. As a popular tweet says, 95% of modern conservatism seems to be making up a scenario in your head and then being really mad about it, and the incessant right wing outrage about the idea of so-called “15 minute cities” is a prime example of this exact phenomenon. Normally, this would be too asinine to even comment on, but there’s a very real chance it will hurt the future of our cities and the people who live there.

Quick review, what are 15 minute cities? It’s the idea that cities should be planned so as many of its residents as possible can get to the majority of their daily destinations in a brisk, 15 minute walk. From groceries, to coffee, to pubs, to the post office, to the pharmacy, to the park and playgrounds, it should all be walkable and convenient. The goal is to open up more space for greenery, encourage more people to walk, and let the neighborhoods’ residents meet each other to improve neighborly relationships, while getting more fresh air, dropping pounds, and encouraging small, local business.

“Well, that sounds sort of nice, but come on, does any city like this even exist? It’s not like you can just see if a concept like that works before building it, so of course people will be a little hesitant to embrace it.”

Yeah, you see, the thing about that is it’s pretty normal in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and mixed used YIMBY neighborhoods across the U.S., Canada, and Australia. People can often get to where they want to go by either walking or public transit because it’s a waste of gas — or electricity — and money to drive and find a parking spot if you’re not going all that far. Once they’re where they want to be, there are places for them to explore, new restaurants and bars to try, and some sort of attraction like a museum, or public park, or local market. The design is smaller and denser, but also more alive.

After decades of urban sprawls and superhighways, a lot of Americans feel like they are trapped under virtual house arrest in suburbia with its uniform developments, big box stores, and neighbors who frequently keep to themselves. Likewise, they know that the country failed to build enough houses and apartments after the 2008 crash, and the we’re short by at least 3.2 million homes. This is why housing prices soared out of control. Not enough inventory to go around means that developers or owners can set rents and prices sky high, often with the help of software.

And so, there’s a growing movement to upend existing sprawl-focused zoning to help lower the costs of infrastructure to serve exploding suburbs, build more infill housing, more multi-level buildings, and denser mixed use neighborhoods that wouldn’t be all that different from what you may encounter in, say, Munich, or Innsbruck, or Tokyo, or Seoul. More housing — and not just “luxury” housing, the kind built to look really nice on the cheap and then sold or rented for eye-watering sums — would mean there will be more inventory, forcing home price down.

People also seem to like the idea as prices of homes in walkable neighborhoods can be $82 more per square foot in high demand areas, and almost 24% more across the country. In short, a lot of buyers want convenience and things to do without having to sit in traffic, which is why the 15-minute city is becoming a popular concept.

enter the evil jeee… no, illumina… no, globalists

But among the influgrifters and right wing social media, the 15-minute city is now the “elite’s” grand plan to turn cities into open air prisons as illustrated by a tweet from a Libertarian Party account asking what happens if someone gets a dream job offer, but the position requires them to drive 30 minutes to the office. This, you see, is a gotcha of the highest order because that person couldn’t walk to work in 15 minutes or less, thus obliterating the entire idea of… living in a walkable neighborhood?

“Okay, so, obviously, this person takes the job and makes the drive to the office if this is their dream. Hopefully there’s also public transport like light rail or a subway station by their home so if their car breaks down one day, or they just don’t feel like driving, it’s an option for them as well. Then they come home and walk to a nearby pub for a beer and some appetizers to take the edge off after a hard day. Right?”

Oh you poor, poor, sad, deluded beta soy boy sheeple. No, according to the sleuths at the venerable Facebook-based investigative outlet Save ‘Murica, No To The Globalist Agenda and self-help/psychology/femdom milking porn guru Jordan Peterson — who lives in a textbook 15 minute city neighborhood in Toronto, funny enough — what will really happen is that anyone trying to leave their designated 15 minute zone either has to have a government pass or be jailed. If not worse.

But wait a second, why? None of the mayors who said their cities should explore more of these neighborhoods implied any of this. No document from a sinister government agency or NGO detailed such a plan. No urban planner posted renderings with armed thugs in riot gear and menacing helmets, or small death squads of robots roaming the outskirts of each zone, looking for runaways. Not one soul outside of the conspiracy klaxon brigade ever suggested even a hint of such insanity.

Their only evidence? A city in England making cars use the main roads instead of just cutting through a bunch of narrow central streets on a whim to open up more space for public transport, cyclists, and pedestrians during certain hours of the day. But if you read their hyperventilating about the coming of the New World Order, you would have come away thinking that English drivers were about to be forced to pay to drive their own cars in a prelude to banning all private car ownership.

“But seriously, what the hell? Are they just lying to their fans for attention? Or are they really so dense that they believe their own bullshit?”

It’s impossible to say, really. What we can say though, is that when their sing to their Tinfoil Choir, they’re hitting all the right notes. People with extreme views tend to see any new idea or stimuli as a threat. That’s not just me saying that, scientists who look at brains for a living found that the amygdala, the center of the brain responsible for fear and emotional expression, is enlarged in self-identified conservatives. They also seem to be just more afraid of things in general, even if the threats are not real.

So, you see, it doesn’t matter if 15 minute cities is just a buzzword for walkable, more urbanized neighborhoods, and not “Human Settlement Zones” from some low budget dystopian apocalypse directed by Asylum Entertainment. They could be if you decide that it’s a plausible enough scenario, and that’s all The Batshit Conspiracy Industrial Complex really needs to rile up their audience of people living in perpetual fear, rage, and higher then normal odds of a mental illness.

how paranoid fantasies stop real solutions

Now, there are definitely issues with the 15 minute city concept being implemented in cities built by mid-20th century sprawl. European cities have a marked advantage as they’ve been around for hundreds of years — and in cases of cities like Kyiv, London, or Athens, between 1,600 and 3,400 years — and started off as dense and walkable since unless you subscribe to the Ancient Alien Astronaut mythology, their residents did not exactly have cars. A lot of North American cities were built for the car and the suburb, and you’d have to fill in existing dead zones to make walkability a thing.

It would be one thing if tyrannical city planners were demanding that every city was raized to the ground and rebuilt as a pedestrian utopia. That’s not at all what’s been happening. Instead, people have been paying significant premiums to live in denser, walkable neighborhoods with more stuff to do, more greenery, and cleaner air thanks to reduced car traffic, and a lot of developers, city planners, and mayors looked at the data, said “well, if people want it, and it’s good for health and the environment…,” and now want to forgo yet another ugly, and loud stroad, or 15 lane mega-highway.

Zoning laws, infrastructure investments, highway and route changes, NIMBY lawsuits, environmental approvals, and the locals’ opinions are all things you need to consider when trying to retrofit a city. We also need to be realistic that maximum walkability may not always happen everywhere it’s tried. In reality, 15 minute cities may become the trend of the future in some states while in others, 30 minute cities may become the norm as this is the best developers and builders can do.

But these are debates and discussions we need to be having, yet we just keep being dragged into the cavern of paranoid fantasies of the web’s loudest and most extreme shock jocks, exploited by populist politicians who’d rather be professional trolls since it’s a lot easier than having to do boring things like serve constituents, debate, mark up, and write bills, pass laws, and evaluate policies.

Meanwhile, tens of millions trap themselves in the Bizzaro World of paranoid fiction, perpetual grievance, victimhood, and learned helplessness of their choice. Hell, I’m surprised that none of the aforehinted lunatics said that 15 minute cities remind them of Soviet “microdistricts” and went off on a rant about the communist takeover of the West in typical John Birch Society style. (Oh dear Tzeentch, I’m giving the bastards ideas, aren’t I?)

We’re locked into the perfect conditions for an endless orgy of rage, crisis, and social conflict over literally anything at the drop of a hat. We know there are big, nasty, and important problems to solve and changes to make so we can adapt to the future. But we’re also not allowed to solve those problems or make those changes because every one of those efforts is apparently part of some sinister plot, or dismissed out of hand as too extreme and expensive.

And this is where paranoia, stupidity, and attention-seeking influgrifters really cost us. If we actually tackled the problem of severe under-building, we wouldn’t be 3.2 million homes short and there wouldn’t be a housing crisis shore to shore. If we built greener, more walkable, denser neighborhoods, we’d have nicer, more tight knit communities with healthier, happier residents instead of hiding in each others’ houses, spending so many of our evenings sniping at one another on social media. (Hey, we see you doing it, stop trying to act like you don’t.)

Instead, long festering problems with unsustainable suburbs, runaway pollution and global warming, a toxic, dying web filled with lies and fraud, and our global discourse controlled by trolls trying to one-up each other, ended up requiring more and more ambitious and overarching solutions to tackle. Meanwhile, as everything feels like it’s spiraling completely out of control, nothing is actually allowed to change in a positive direction, and there’s zero accountability for our leaders and the unhinged billionaire tech bros trying to play them like puppets.

So, no wonder that all we seem to have left to do is lash out at each other, then listen to the paranoid, angry voices in our heads. And this asinine, ridiculous conspiracy in which cities become glorified human zoos because… reasons, oh, and some lunatics on the web said so, is a perfect example of exactly that.