elfwreck:

probablyasocialecologist:

“While there is not enough ecological or even physical space on Earth for everyone to enjoy private luxury, there is enough to provide everyone with public luxury: magnificent parks, hospitals, swimming pools, art galleries, tennis courts and transport systems, playgrounds and community centres. We should each have our own small domains – private sufficiency – but when we want to spread our wings, we could do so without seizing resources from other people.”

— George Monbiot, Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction

The shrinking world of childhood free-ranging

Homes used to be for eating and sleeping, with general hobby-interest activities being outside, in public. Playing indoors was limited to inhospitable climates–winter (but not all of winter), during storms, days when it’s too hot to safely run around.

We slowly shifted that, and capitalistic businesses jumped on the opportunity to insist your home needed to contain every possible amenity you might need to access. Your kids need a full playset in your yard, not one at the park three blocks away. You need a workshop of your own, not the town community center. You need a washing machine (of your own; can’t share one with the family next door) and a dryer because you can’t hang things up outside.

If you like swimming, you need your own pool, not one shared with the community. Fifteen thousand gallons of water for one family to sometimes swim for a few hours a week during summer. Multiplied by several families in the neighborhood, of course. Can’t be sharing that kind of resource.

You need an extensive private movie, games, and music collection; can’t just have a robust library that caters to the local community interests. Can’t just acquire a few favorites, especially anything obscure, and borrow popular movies and books–and production companies make sure of that by refusing to let libraries own digital content. Instead, they often “license” it and eventually it expires, so you can’t count on the library having something you saw last year. Better buy a copy for yourself. But not share it with friends, of course. They’ll need to buy their own copy.

And of course, we allllll need to pay for our own internet, sometimes several times over (every phone in the house & the house itself might have separate accounts) instead of the city providing internet as a basic utility. Internet companies fight hard against municipal internet plans.

Municipal Broadband Is Restricted In 18 States Across The U.S. In 2021 - BroadbandNow

Capitalism works very hard to keep us isolated in tiny boxes, because communities that involve spending time together, wind up sharing resources.