The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  In 1938, Hess’s triangle sold for just $2 per square inch (6.5 square centimetres); adjusted for inflation, the triangle’s price would now be more than $17,000. Land at that price works out to $106.6 billion per acre, though Hess’s cement sidewalk property yields nothing. No one will ever harvest crops there, or prospect for gold, or draw precious water. Cities are the centres of power and capital in the world, and New York is about as central as it gets. So you’re not just paying for land; you’re paying for scarce land that everyone else wants really badly.

  Today, real estate is the business of buying, selling, and trading space. But the idea that land can be “ours”—like measurements, borders, and nation-states—is yet another human invention. Flipping through real estate listings, you might forget that this idea is only a few hundred years old. As Simon Fairlie, editor of The Land, writes in the magazine, “ ‘The idea that one man could possess all rights to one stretch of land to the exclusion of everybody else’ was outside the comprehension of most tribespeople, or indeed of medieval peasants. The king, or the Lord of the Manor, might have owned an estate in one sense of the word, but the peasant enjoyed all sorts of so-called ‘usufructory’ rights which enabled him, or her, to graze stock, cut wood or peat, draw water or grow crops, on various plots of land at specified times of year.”

  These were the “commons.” Here, villagers and peasants shared cropland, pasture, and forest areas. And while plots were subdivided to a degree—a peasant might have a small garden by his home, for example, while another had an area where their animals regularly spent time at pasture—land was not “owned” in the way we think of it today. Use and custom meant more than title deed and measurement.

  For use of the land, peasants gave lords and landowners a share of the crops, along with their allegiance. But for landowners, this wasn’t always enough, as they realized that idleness would result once the peasants had produced enough food to feed themselves and their families. Writing to the editor of a commercial and agricultural magazine, one landowner lamented, “When a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings…the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work.” In other words, people (quite logically) would kick their feet up once they had laboured enough to put food in their mouths.

  For landowners however, this behaviour was deemed laziness. Just as we saw in the last chapter, on time, as soon as space became an abstraction and a commodity, the interests of labour and capital diverged: the rich came to hate idleness just as much as the poor hated being overworked. But profit off the land came not only from use of workers’ time. A key motivation for landowners to change the system of the commons derived from a new form of profit: England was becoming renowned for its high-quality wool.

  From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, wealthy landowners fenced off open pastures into “enclosures” and kicked out the peasants in order to privatize the land for grazing sheep. With the help of Parliament, these evictions were enforced by law. If 80 percent of land was owned by one title (as it often was with the wealthy landowners) that meant it could be officially enclosed.

  By the mid-1800s, this land grab covered about one-sixth the area of England, or seven million acres, and after four thousand acts of Parliament, what was once common land became enclosed. For the peasants, there was little recourse. As a literate commoner wrote to his landlord in 1824, “Should a poor man take one of your sheep from the common, his life would be forfeited by law. But should you take the common from a hundred poor men’s sheep, the law gives no redress.”

  With the profits to be had in the wool market, more land was cleared. From the mid- to late eighteenth century, and continuing into the nineteenth century, cottages were burned and thousands of families forcefully evicted from the Scottish Highlands in what came to be known as the “Clearances.” The result was a massive migration, with most Highlanders heading to the Lowlands in search of factory work, while other clans were shipped off to find work and land in the United States or Canada.

  This was the beginning of urbanization. The dispossessed who were no longer able to grow their own food often had no other choice but to move to urban centres and become factory workers. By 1760, the Industrial Revolution had begun, and the machines were hungry for cheap labour. Along with these forced evictions, then, was opportunity, which produced a vector for rural flight. In England and Wales in 1801, 65 percent of the population lived in rural areas; exactly one hundred years later, only 23 percent of the population remained.

  Enclosures may seem like a relic of the distant past, but nearly identical processes are in effect in poor countries today. According to Oxfam, in the last decade alone, eighty-one million acres of land worldwide (about the size of Germany) has been seized from peasants and rural farmers and sold off to foreign investors.

  But it’s not always the fault of the foreign buyer. Often they are told the land is “uncultivated,” the assumption being it is unoccupied. But as land reform experts have noted, uncultivated means not farmed, which does not mean the land is unowned or unused. In Africa, for instance, as Fred Pearce writes, “About four-fifths of the continent’s 6 billion acres is not formally owned by anyone other than the state. There is no legal title, but rural inhabitants regard it as theirs.”

  As illustrated by David Hess’s case, land can also be appropriated through eminent domain, where the government recognizes property ownership but still forces a purchase of land to convert it from private to public space. This has been happening on a large scale in China. Transforming the country from an agricultural backwater into an empire of gleaming metropolises in the space of a few decades has meant the physical displacement of fifty million Chinese farmers since the 1990s in the name of economic development. In the first decade of this century alone, almost a million villages were abandoned or razed. According to research by Tianjin University and China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs, between 2000 and 2010 China went from having 3.7 million traditional villages to 2.6 million. That is the equivalent of losing three hundred villages a day.

  China’s National Bureau of Statistics estimates that by 2034 less than 25 percent of the country’s population will be rural. This trend, from periphery to centre, is taking place all around the world as people flood from rural areas into the cities. UN-Habitat has estimated that around the world in 2009 alone, three million people were moving to cities every week, and by 2030 one-third of humanity will be living in urban centres. As the human population grows and more people move into the cities, the available space for us to share shrinks dramatically.

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  IN PARIS, NEW YORK CITY, and London, in some of the highest priced neighbourhoods in the world, a new real estate phenomenon has emerged: “zombie flats” and “ghost mansions.” They are not haunted houses but rather homes that literally have no soul. If they are spooky, it is only because they are empty. In London, seven out of every ten residences in these prime areas are investments for overseas buyers; in Paris, the number is one in four; and in Manhattan, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue from Forty-Ninth Street to Seventieth Street, almost a third of homes are unoccupied for ten months of the year. The properties are vacant because for the super-rich these spaces are not their primary residences. They are often third or fourth homes. This type of “land banking” is now being documented in major cities around the world, with the number of empty residences on the rise in cities like Miami, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Dubai, Singapore, San Francisco, and Sydney.

  The super-rich, like the kings and lords of old, own the vast majority of the land. In England, nearly half the country is owned by just 0.06 percent of the population. In the meantime, as Simon Fairlie writes, “Most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.” Considering the crush of people in urban centres, the imbalance is obvious. In 2018, in the United Kingdom, 216,000 h
omes were empty for six months or more; at the same time, 78,000 families were in temporary accommodations or homeless. The numbers in the United States were even more egregious after the 2008 financial crisis: for every homeless person there were five empty homes. We may well be the only species on Earth to actively deprive our own kind from inhabiting a space when it is available.

  In China, the discrepancy is stark. In his book Ghost Cities of China, Wade Shepard writes that “the world’s most populated country without a doubt has the world’s largest number of empty homes.” Rapid development in China during its economic boom outstripped the demand for new homes. In its rush to build, China used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than was used throughout the twentieth century in all of the United States. Looking at mobile phone usage and internet activity to measure how much life could be detected in these vacant zones, researchers from Peking University in Beijing found that there are approximately fifty “ghost cities” in the country that remain largely uninhabited. Like an architectural model writ large, apartment blocks, shopping malls and plazas, parks and playgrounds have all been built; the only thing is, like a zombie town, there are no people. The cities are empty.

  But with massive migration from rural areas to the city, you might be wondering where all those people go. Lured in with promises of work and a chance of achieving wealth, many Chinese migrants come to live in the factories that employ them. As George Knowles writes in the South China Morning Post, some of these factories look like labour camps. Dormitory blocks built to house fifty thousand people are filled with steel bunk-beds (some with twelve beds per room) and workers wash in communal showers. For this, they have about ¥160 (US$25) deducted from their salaries a month.

  In cramped cities like Hong Kong, where the average 37-square-metre apartment costs US$2,000 a month, the poor have the same average living space as jail prisoners. A survey conducted by one tenants’ rights group found that the average space occupied by families living in partitioned cubicles in Kwai Chung, a suburb of Hong Kong, was 4.65 square metres, or “roughly the size of three toilet cubicles or half the size of a standard parking space.” Prisoners, according to Hong Kong Correctional Services, have an average space of 4.60 square metres per person. But believe it or not, even that amount of space is a stretch for some. Some subdivided flats in Hong Kong, called “coffin cubicles,” are so small they total only 1.4 square metres.

  We have become so blind to the fact that our rules of space are artificial, and that we have created a system where we imprison ourselves. Today, the wealthy in our world own empty ghost mansions, while the poor live in coffins.

  In big cities on the Chinese mainland, the situation is just as extreme. For the urban poor who live centrally to avoid long commutes, there’s a shortage of affordable housing, and as such many have chosen to live underground. In Beijing, an estimated one million people live in a subterranean network of former bomb shelters. They have been called the Rat Tribe. Rents are half of what they might be above ground, costing an average of ¥436 (US$70) a month for an underground room that’s just over 9.75 square metres with shared kitchens and bathrooms. The cramped facilities are often unhygienic. In one documented case, the occupants of eighty rented rooms shared a single toilet. These are people who cannot afford something as simple as sunlight. As Zhuang Qiuli, a young pedicurist who lives underground, put it, “There is no difference between me and the people who live in the posh condominium above. We wear the same clothes and have the same hairstyles. The only difference is we cannot see the sun.”

  *1 For human beings, space is also emotional. Indigenous groups often speak of the spiritual connection they have to the land. And we’ve all experienced that feeling with a place we’ve come to know well. We have fond memories of our favourite places growing up and often a dear attachment to our homes.

  *2 With apologies to Bishop George Berkeley.

  *3 Empires require ideological consonance to maintain rule over vast landscapes. Mao understood this well when in 1949 he instituted Mandarin as the “official” language of China. When people say “Do you speak Chinese?” they are conflating at least eight different linguistic groups and hundreds of different dialects.

  *4 As the Supreme Court ruled, “The common law doctrine that ownership of land extends to the periphery of the universe has no place in the modern world.”

  *5 Harvard astronomer Jonathan McDowell has argued the Kármán line should in fact be set at eighty kilometres, as some elliptical satellites have been observed at this altitude without “crashing to Earth.”

  9

  HUMAN ROBOTS

  And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual.

  —H.L. MENCKEN

  The Eyes Above Us

  IT WAS OBVIOUS that the dot on the map had stopped moving, but it was some time before people realized that the dot on the map had died. That dot was Michael Hall, a cyclist in a 5,500-kilometre endurance race being watched online by a community of “dot watchers,” fans who kept track of the cyclists along their thirteen-day route from Fremantle to Sydney, Australia.

  Each dot had an athlete’s nametag, and it wasn’t unusual for them to pause here and there, when the athletes stopped to rest, take meal breaks, or go to the bathroom. The GPS live trackers were on board the bikes to ensure that cyclists didn’t cheat, while also providing the fans with live coverage of the riders they were following.

  Over the course of the race, people began to warm up to the little dots moving about the screen. As Belinda Hoare, one of the online trackers, said, “You’d go from checking maybe once or twice a day, to checking a couple of times a day, to checking hourly, and then you’d have the map open constantly….You really did feel like you got to know these people.”

  On March 18, 2017, Hall’s dot was in second place when at 6:22 A.M. it suddenly stopped moving near the intersection of the Monaro Highway and Williamsdale Road. It was the final day of the race, and puzzled fans began to wonder why Hall had paused at this critical point. What they did not yet know was that he had been struck by a car and killed. By GPS, they had witnessed his death.

  In a few short decades, GPS has become so ubiquitous and indispensable it has entered almost every sphere of our lives. The moment you step outside with your smartphone in hand, you too are a moving dot.*1 And though you cannot see it, the world has been overlaid with a time-and-space grid. All of us are synchronized to it and can be traced by our coordinates. We are largely unaware of the role satellites play in our lives, but stock markets, telecommunications, jogging routes, drone strikes, local weather forecasts, ATM machines, traffic lights, and food deliveries all rely on this public infrastructure that orbits silently high above us.

  The signals are controlled by the U.S. Air Force and used by about a billion people daily. At night, you might occasionally see one of these GPS satellites twinkling in the sky like an artificial star as it reflects the sun. Each satellite weighs around two metric tons, and with their solar panels stretched out, the largest have wingspans of about thirty-five metres, or the length of two tractor-trailers. Orbiting at an altitude of 20,200 kilometres above Earth, each satellite belongs to a constellation of twenty-four to thirty-one GPS satellites at any given time, that zip around the planet at speeds of more than eleven thousand kilometres an hour.

  In their book GPS Declassified, Eric Frazier and Richard Easton imagine what Captain Cook, who navigated with real stars, might think of this modern technology.

  COOK: What use are invisible stars?

  COMMANDER: We don’t need to see them. The satellites transmit electromagnetic frequencies…radio signals that our equipment uses to determine our position. Radio signals are very rapid vibrations that our instruments detect with their antennas, which for them are like our ears, but these are not sounds anyone can hear.

  COOK: You steer your ship with sounds you cannot hear from stars you cannot see?

  That is exactly what we do. Humans can h
ear sound at a range of twenty hertz to twenty kilohertz, but GPS radio signals are much higher than that. Operating at bands of 1,227.6 megahertz and 1,575.42 megahertz, these radio waves, when they reach the ground, aren’t audible to any animal on Earth. Radio signals are incredibly faint. As Carl Sagan once said, “The total energy picked up by all the radio telescopes on the entire planet in all of history is less than the energy of a single snowflake hitting the ground.” That statement was made when he recorded the television show Cosmos in 1980. According to astronomer Frank Drake, who made the original calculation, with the additional radio waves beaming down to Earth since then, the amount might now be equal to “two snowflakes…maybe three.”

  Using receivers, however, we are able to pick up the faint waves of these signals as they wash over us. And it’s not just the US complement of satellites we can choose from either. Russia has its GLONASS satellites, the EU has Galileo, and China has its BeiDou system of navigation satellites. Pulling in signals from one or more of these systems, along with a base station at a known position for reference, today’s civilian GPS receivers can now pinpoint your location within 1.5 metres (it had been within an area about the size of a football field in the 1990s).*2

  Of course, GPS satellites, which operate at medium Earth orbit (MEO) and circle the planet twice a day, are not the only eyes in the sky. At low Earth orbit (LEO), or an altitude of two thousand kilometres and below, you’ll find the majority of Earth observation satellites. Circling Earth every ninety minutes, these satellites are close to the planet’s surface and are frequently used for meteorology, map-making, and environmental monitoring. Zooming up much higher, to an altitude of 35,786 kilometres is where you’ll find the satellites operating at geosynchronous orbit (GSO) and geostationary Earth orbit (GEO). These satellites are synchronized with the rotational period of the planet *3 and are primarily used for telecommunications, where the signals can be constantly and reliably accessed from the same spot on Earth. As artist and geographer Trevor Paglen points out, geostationary satellites are “thousands of times further away” and “remain locked as man-made moons in perpetual orbit long after their operational lifetimes.” Because they are too far away to bring back down and burn up in the atmosphere, instead, when these satellites reach the end of their lives, operators on Earth use on-board propellant to bump them up three hundred kilometres into what’s known as a graveyard orbit. Paglen notes that here they will stay circling Earth, outlasting the pyramids as remnants of our civilization. Archaeologists of the future will not just dig the earth; they will likely uncover much about the twenty-first-century human record by examining our well-preserved machines looming high up in our space cemeteries.