Building Better Worlds?

Andor, Gaza and Mass Gentrification of our Planet

Janos Mark Szakolczai

It is self-evident that the price of everyday goods is steadily increasing. I’m no economist, but far as I can casually observe – without going back to the introduction of the Euro or our grandparents’ struggles – this crisis became universal sometime in the wake of the pandemic.

Due to COVID measures, lockdown, and the stalled economy, prices increased both reasonably and without reason. What were you to do to survive in such circumstances? And while new causes came to be cited, the reality of rising prices remained the same. When Russia invaded Ukraine, production costs soared worldwide – of course, because of the conflict, there was less gas for cars and heating, less wheat for bread, less sunflower seeds for oil, less wood for furniture and whatnot. And since then, we’ve seen further targeted conflicts creating greater costs, increasing expenses, shifts of budget, and less for everyone. Now, Trump’s tariffs are making yet another increment. Add to this Elon Musk’s cryptic obsession with DOGE, and it’s clear almost everything is becoming more and more expensive.

And not just more expensive, not just less (fabulous neologism of our times, shrinkflation), but worse overall (culminating in the anti-euphemism ‘shitflation’). From computers to software to cars and toys, you name it. Shitflation, similar to the term ‘enshittification’ coined by Cory Doctorow, points out how what once used to work perfectly has increasingly become updated, changed, improved into something worse, more expensive, less thought-out — a tangle of potential glitches and bugs. This appears to be happening globally and systematically; with every new update, things get worse, going from being inventive and nice to routine and sold out. What was recently affordable will soon cost twice as much – because if the price does not go up, surely the quality must go down, gettit?

Granted, this opens up some consumerist opportunities. Should we buy now before things get even more expensive? Maybe. Should we raise prices now because everyone else is doing it? That, too (As I write this, I’ve just received an email from Audible notifying me—without apology—that my membership will go up by £1 per month “to improve services.”)

But things get trickier when price increases hit basic necessities. When they affect fixed expenses, they exacerbate not just the cost of living, but the cost of being, of simply existing with minimal quality of life.

And this is where my thoughts culminate: what does this wave of rising costs remind me of? Quite evidently, gentrification—the process by which populations are slowly pushed out of spaces they can no longer afford. It’s a common feature of capitalist systems. As Mark Fisher wrote some decades ago, this is part of the reality of our time, where the ‘there’s no alternative’ trope is evident both in the global North and South, where whole communities have been displaced to facilitate ‘development’

Mass displacement becomes the haunting milieu of our time, pre-eminently in the ongoing conflict in the Gaza Strip, where the removal of the entire population has been seriously proposed, or the growing tensions between India and Pakistan. It is even the theme of the latest Star Wars series, Andor, in which a resistance movement struggles against the destruction of their planet by the Empire which seeks to exploit its mining resources (a topic stolen from Avatar (2009) really, who stole it from Princess Mononoke (1997) – ad libitum). Beyond science fiction, the mass displacement of people from everyday activity is the central effect of the Internet, with the erosion of community life and social capital, noted already by Putnam in his Bowling Alone (1995), and proven by the constant, perpetual and systematic cuts to youth groups, unions, sport clubs, and churches across the western world. The enshittification of the ‘offline’ existence becomes a further reinforcement of the ‘online’ community, with social media becoming the giant grinder to which everyone is displaced and relocated. This is the 2019 thesis of scholar Jessa Lingel, who describes how the internet itself may become a perfectly channelled, subjected, controlled and disciplined space with its narrow and regulated rules: a perfectly gentrified environment that users, citizens, have little control of or sense of belonging to.

But if we leave behind Star Wars and take the topic to the extreme, what may be the ultimate goal of this mass planetary gentrification? Let’s consider some tongue-in-cheek provocations.

One is the classic “boiling frog” analogy: step by step, degree by degree, we come to accept changes we never would have tolerated all at once—like price hikes and creeping social decay. Let’s not get too dramatic, of course. The world has seen worse financial crises, especially inflation-related ones. Countries like Greece, Hungary, and Argentina have all endured infamous financial collapses, their currencies reduced to near-worthlessness—banknotes repurposed as blankets or children’s kites.

History is full of these wild stories, often deployed to make you feel less bad (or more guilty) for your current struggles. So, hush up, pay that extra pound here and there, and be grateful that things are “generally better.” And if you work hard? Great! Keep going. Engage with the meritocracy of the moment. These rising costs shouldn’t affect, nor worry, you too much—so they say. Hold tight, the best is yet to come.

That’s the charm of gentrification: hold tight, keep paying more, and soon your area will be nicer. We’ll have cafés, students, and artisanal sourdough—if that’s your thing. If not, it is an acquired taste, trust me.

Needless to say, but let’s say it anyway, even holding tight does not work out too well. Take Ireland, which possesses among the highest levels of GDP per capita in the world, and yet 41% of the 18-34 year olds are either actively planning to emigrate or considering it.

And if we take the matter on a planetary scale, what does gentrification really mean?

Here’s where the second provocation creeps in: figures like Elon Musk have long advocated finding a “new home” now that we’ve trashed this one—our Barbie Dreamhouse of a planet. We need a replacement, and we need it soon.

SpaceX and similar ventures promote the idea of out-of-world travel with the same utopian rhetoric once used to market Tesla – as if high-tech, hyper-expensive self-driving electric vehicles could somehow save the planet while you email from a chip in your brain. They’ve not even made particular attempts at hiding this. In a rapture of ironic genius, the engineers of SpaceX programme put a dummy of Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise inside one of their rockets. This would be a cool citation if only it didn’t remind us that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is the recurrent arch-enemy of the series (more than the monstrous xenomorphs), with their ‘Building Better Worlds’ motto that ends up justifying the most horrendous capitalist and military pursuit of profit above all else. Hurray for the future of mankind!

Needless to say, but let’s say it anyway, that kind of thinking doesn’t actually take us very far, neither technologically nor energetically.

Rather, hypermodern tools such as AI, rather than offering solutions, diminishing costs, and empowering users, promise even more ‘gentrification’, mass-displacing individuals out of the workforce, out of factories (replaced by automated machines), or out of their offices. Returning to COVID, this was a glimpse of how the frog can actually be merrily boiled in front of our very eyes. You get sent home to do remote work, and then your work is gone (even more remotely), and you are left home in a house you may no longer afford, and so you’re further displaced, ad libitum.

So if we are being priced out of our own planet… who exactly are we leaving it for? And for what in exchange?

Well, anyway, I hope they’ll serve sourdough on Mars.