The Disconnect: Flock Cameras, French Protests & Data Centres #160

<p>The thread this week is a disconnect. Not between the one per cent and everyone else, but between a comfortable top fifth of society and the eighty per cent now waking up worried about the bills, the job and the children’s future. When those two groups stop meeting, even in a supermarket queue, the ground starts to shift towards what we have long called the pitchforks, and our sense is that moment is closer than it was five years ago.</p><p>We work through four cases. French students and parents protesting schools that no longer deliver the university ticket they promised, against a government too boxed in by its own neoliberalism to tax its way out. The eviction in Spain of an eighty-seven-year-old woman, who has since died, and the fierce counter-reaction now reshaping Spanish housing policy. And Flock cameras in the United States, a hundred and twenty thousand automated plate readers already used to stalk ex-partners and track people near abortion clinics, sold with the line that the company merely exposed abuse rather than enabling it. And, finally, a data centre construction site of Google in Finland.</p><p>Underneath each case is the same argument. Capitalism within liberal democracy works only with limits on predatory behaviour and a basic level of trust holding society together. Companies that forget they have a social function, and elites that treat life as a game of turning ten million into a hundred, break that trust. And once it breaks, the reaction is rarely polite, whether it arrives as a ballot, a new law, or something a good deal less orderly.</p><p>This podcast is an individual project between us, Dario Hasenstab and Balder Hageraats. We are supported by our producer Stefani Obradovic from Western Bubble Insights &amp; Strategy. If you would like to get in touch with us, write us an email at <a href="mailto:thewesternbubble@gmail.com" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">thewesternbubble@gmail.com</a>.</p>