Look at what the government and Big Tech are doing. There are constant articles here being posted about surveillance, loss of privacy, etc. It's a whole lot easier to control the population when you gradually make it harder for them to travel unhindered and untracked.
Chickens in a factory farm can be described as being in "livable" conditions. After all, they are still alive and healthy enough (for a controlled period of time.)
They're only calling it a "conspiracy theory" in an attempt to discredit the other side.
Who benefits from the propagation of this idea?
Everyone who still believes in freedom.
The concept of "cars == freedom" is completely absurd to me. The mode of transport that has a unique identifier printed on it, that you need a licence to drive that can be revoked, that you have to pay the government to use, is considered the beacon of free and open transport.
In fact, many car centric city designs force you to own a car which seems like the opposite of freedom.
Cars are required to have registration and license plates, and most of them have GPS tracking as well. If you don't want to be tracked, ride a bicycle.
Have you tried to take a 500-mile trip on a bicycle? While carrying a hundred pounds of luggage?
You also have to realize that the only car that increases your freedom is your own: everybody else's reduces your freedom. They take a lot of space, they make a lot of noise, they reduce visibility, they hinder pedestrian and bicycle movement, and so on. If you believe in freedom, you have to be holistic about it and learn to make some compromises.
I happen to like the space and enjoy the noise.[1] So does nearly everyone around me.
You can squeeze together in your claustrophobic factory-farm cities if you like, but leave those who don't out of it.
[1] I highly recommend taking a ride in a 70s "land yacht" with a mildly tuned engine sometime. It might change your perception of cars entirely if all you've been in are cramped sluggish econoboxes.
We are not talking about freedom, we are talking about entitlement. You are not entitled to free parking on the side of streets, nor to be able to drive on every single street, nor to do so at a high speed, nor to be as noisy as you want to be. Other people have needs too. People need space to walk, they need space to bike, and in many cases this space has to be taken from space that was previously dedicated to cars, because that's all there is. It's only fair.
In any case, no one is forcing you to live in a city. Live wherever you want. But many people like them, and people who like cities tend to like them even more when there are fewer cars (not zero -- fewer). If you don't like it, that's fine. Stay in your paradise, and stay out of ours (or park at the bus station).
You are not "entitled" to walk or bike either.
In the Robert Moses era mass transit was destroyed because it benefited poor African American communities, and highways were put down to tear apart their neighborhoods. Today, people use "urban" as a dog whistle for "black".
People decided the pandemic was no big deal and we should just let it rip in the US the moment early data showed it affected African Americans and other minorities more than whites.
It may not be the true explanation all of the time, but if you ask yourself if there could be a racist motivation for adopting a particular set of odd views, it's amazing how easy it is to connect the dots.
Also, these people live in the burbs, and their experience of driving into a city is their experience of the city. It's one of the reasons they hate cities. Driving in is confusing and stressful. Add an alien system of congestion pricing involving some transponder they've never seen before and it's just too much for them.
To the extent that the concerns are legitimate, I think we need to look at China, and at the way people were locked down in small condo blocks during COVID. There was a fear that the same tactics would be employed in "Western" countries.
There is an irony, however, which is that self-contained condo blocks and "gated communities" are at least as prone to this as are organic grids. Y'know -- actual good urbanism.
Finally, I think they do perceive, in their own way, the housing crisis. They recognize that housing is generally more affordable outside cities, so they see the push towards cities as a push towards renting and non-ownership. I would prefer more affordable housing within cities, but I can sort of understand this argument.
It is something that should be examined and critically discussed thats not what i'm talking about
I'm talking about how suddenly people who have never so much as listened to an episode of 99PI before or showen any interest are suddenly passionately saying livable cities are a way to control us.
Who benefits from the propagation of this idea? Is there just someone out there trying to bring about the end of humanity as fast as possible by making people crazy about any thing remotely sensible? Or is this just some discursive collateral damage coming from some ideological battle going on somewhere else where livable cities became one of the front lines, and the bull-shit psyops ideas leaked out every via the internet..