Hacker Cinema
Push
2019 · Film · documentary · 92 min
Directed by Fredrik Gertten
Housing prices are skyrocketing in cities around the world. Incomes are not. PUSH sheds light on a new kind of faceless landlord, our increasingly unliveable cities and an escalating crisis that has an effect on us all. This is not gentrification, it’s a different kind of monster.The film follows Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, as she’s travelling the globe, trying to understand who’s being pushed out of the city and why. “I believe there’s a huge difference between housing as a commodity and gold as a commodity. Gold is not a human right, housing is,” says Leilani.
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4 comments on Hacker News
> San Francisco does not have the highest average incomes in the world.
Are you joking? I seriously can't tell.
Focusing just on worker's wages, when there are billionaire property owners (specifically owners of IP) living around the corner from you, is just ignorant and disingenuous if this really is your argument.
Steve Jobs famously paid himself $1 a year, remember? I mean, that's probably why he wore those hippy sandals right? He just couldn't afford more because of his measly wage? A few tech CEO's will pull down the average if they all pull off this wonderful tax trick.
Honestly I don't understand why you use these arguments and sources, they seem to me to be completely incompatible with reality.
> I recommend you read the article I provided on rent control.
You keep mentioning rent-control, but I have never said that it's the measure I am for. You do realize rent-control is not the only policy that a city or government can use and enforce right?
I think this 2019 documentary called Push (by Fredrik Gertten) does a great job of showing what is happening to the working classes and their lack of options for affordable housing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4
> 1. Real estate prices in high traffic metros like Los Angeles and Houston will increase further because the return to clear skies from smoggy days and fresh air will be a bonus.
Do you own real estate there or something? Are you aware that many people are homeless? Why is an increase in property values a good thing when it has never been more difficult and more expensive to buy a house than ever before? This increase is in large part due to the disgusting financialization of the housing market.
A documentary called ‘Push’ (2019) does a great job at laying out all the facts, while at the same time showing the impacts of these changes on working class people the world over: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4
For people in Europe or elsewhere you can use http://yt1s.com to download it if it’s region blocked. You can support the filmmakers and rent it too: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/pushthefilm
dear Breck, I've been appreciating your posts on IP, and your campaigning for this cause overall.
I'm wondering if you knew that Karl Marx summed up the desire of communists in one sentence [in The Communist Manifesto]?
"...the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." [1]
That's it.
That's what all the fuss is about. It was a revelation to me because it seemed too simple at first, yet that's all that communists desire to bring about. This desire includes abolishing 'intellectual property' (trade secrets, copyrighted material, patented processes etc.). As you rightly described, any human knowledge originates socially to start with: “We are all putting grains of sand on mountains built by our ancestors”. This inheritance is what we aim to communize. Even though the communist manifesto is over 170 years old, Marx' critique remains as relevant as relevant as ever: capitalist firms caused the opioid crisis in the US; all over the world there's a landlord crisis - with many suffering homelessness (despite there being vacant buildings) [2]; capitalists have moved much of the industrial production to the global south - e.g. clothes are produced in sweatshops in China/Bangladesh/Eritrea; Playstations are causing wars in Congo [3]; our smartphones are made with conflict resources [4]; and we have a toxic e-waste crisis that is blocking us from re-using black-boxed hardware/components (as well as trade secrets and patents stopping many from being able to learn about technology and science in the first place - artificial scarcity of expertise created by capitalists) - as well as well as this e-waste leaching chemicals and poisoning the land, predominantly in the global south [5].
With 'abolishing private property' we don't mean that we want to get rid of the idea of all property systems. We want to get rid of today's bourgeois property system, as it has allowed a small minority to exclude others and plunder the commons [6], resulting in the division of labor and alienation. It's not about having a big or small capitalist government (capitalist governments are the ones who grant monopolies in the first place). We want full democracy in the workplace. That is what we call socialism, communism, or a communist production system. We also believe that this system, communism, is humanity's true nature.
The reason we have been persecuted is because many capitalists are very happy with their 'haul' (and the power-over others domination that comes with it), and because we communists want to continually ask the question: "how we can constantly expand who benefits from new science and technology?" (which we refer to as communizing/socializing the means of production).
I'm a bit scared this might be something you already know, so please do let me know if I've overstepped. My yearning by writing this is to meet my needs for connection, clarity and cooperation, yet this might not be the best strategy.
I also want to share with you this awesome video I watched a few days ago, in case it interests you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U
[1] The Communist Manifesto (chapter 2), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
[2] Push (2019) - a short new documentary about venture capital and the financialization of housing. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iLWpuZrd-I, full: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 (you can easily download with yt1s.com if you're not currently in the US/Canada, if it's geo-blocked)
[3] Inside Africa's 'PlayStation War', https://www.wired.com/2008/07/the-playstation-2/, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J7efsz_Y-c
[4] Blood in the Mobile, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv-hE4Yx0LU
[5] Agbobloshie, Ghana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I
[6] Professor Guy Standing on 'rentier capitalism', https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/
I just re-edited the above comment - does this new edit answer the question you ask?
> You for instance (forgive me getting personal) don't have to engage in high volume trading products using Blackrock Aladdin. You can just get a job, get paid, and spend what you earn.
The problem is that because of the monopoly on today's money, I am literally unable to not take part in society (in the way you describe) without at some point being negatively affected by the slippery things Wall Street does. An example is the recent US government bailouts during COVID-19, which means we are basically paying to clean up corporate fuck-ups caused by the effects of the extremely risky and parasitic ‘financial products’ sold by these big financial institutions.
Leilani Farha, a Canadian human rights lawyer working as the UN's special rapporteur on adequate housing, provides an inside look into one of these dark patterns in the 2019 documentary 'Push'[1]. It focuses on the financialization of housing and in it Blackstone's blueprints are laid out in full. They've now started a new fund to buy more 'distressed real estate' in Europe [2], repeating the same heist they pulled off during the '08 crash. It comes down to buying up housing and becoming landlords en-masse for society's most vulnerable, extracting rents from them, turning neighborhoods (groups of homes) into financial instruments/products, and selling a stake in such a financial product as just another commodity on the market. Yet these are people's lives we're talking about - and they are being systematically destroyed in the pursuit of profit. Profits which are then used to pay for huge corporate bonuses.
In my eyes, the real parasites of today's society are the propertied classes. Not the Precariat class [3], who faces ever-more unstable labor contracts and precarious working conditions, in the global North as well as the South.
The proprietary protocols of the money system constrain and shape all my actions in the world. Unless I live with an indigenous tribe who live in a gift economy, I cannot escape the rules and constraints imposed by the rules of today’s money. This means I am at the mercy of the Rentier capitalist class, which is growing in power every day.
To be honest, we'd have to go deeper and examine Capitalism's move into digital property, and the government granting state backed monopolies - and thus violence backed, through the criminal justice system - in the form of 'intellectual property', which is what I believe is causing a lot of issues in a world:
"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. 'Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.
Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions." [4]
I want us to move to what is commonly referred to as 'Commons based peer production' (Yochai Benckler) - in scholarly circles it would be called ‘Open Access development’. This is literally about connecting the whole world to a hyper-connected network of open source repositories [Ceptr.org], in effect moving us from Platform Capitalism to Protocol/Open Cooperativism. I believe this can start by first evolving or reinventing our wealth acknowledgement systems.
When we also start using Cooperative Open Value Networks instead of enclosed firm-based/Corporate Enterprise Resource Planning systems, we can have transparent supply chains that reveal to us all of the complex information and measurements that are important and which respect humans and planet (say the regenerative capacity of sustainable timber forest, or the productive capacity of a farm during one season).
What happens today is that we reduce everything to one number, it's $dollar value. By doing that we lose a lot of important and vital information about the complex relationships between people, places and resources. Those relationships are obscured. Today's system creates an impoverished one-dimensional view of the physical world where we lose depth by oversimplying things without respecting their complexity and intricacy. Basically the question I am asking is this: how do we fully exploitat the near-zero marginal cost of digital technologies in meeting the promise of a more empowered, less hierarchical, internet?
[1] https://vimeo.com/ondemand/pushthefilm, or available to watch for free with a VPN at https://www.tvo.org/video/documentaries/push-feature-version
[2] https://twitter.com/Noordam/status/1248313189332406273, more info here: https://theconversation.com/wall-street-landlords-are-chasing-the-american-dream-heres-what-it-means-for-families-82146
[3] https://progressiveeconomyforum.com/blog/rentier-capitalism-is-breeding-neo-fascism-vote-wisely/
[4] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corruption-capitalism-guy-standing/
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Edit: the way you say I could 'just get a job and get paid', shows me that you might not see that money is merely a human creation, and something without inherent worth. It then stops you from knowing about the possibility for locally-stewarded mutual credit community currencies, together with Commons based peer production. This view however is something I am seeing surprisingly often. When I started learning about the money system, it was all a bit of a mindfuck to me. I found this blog post to be an exciting read and it helped me a lot:
https://howwegettonext.com/the-future-of-money-depends-on-busting-the-fairy-tales-you-believe-about-its-past-30cbd90619e0