A year ago, I got back from vacation and immediately wrote this post about something that annoyed me on the internet. Today, I have just returned from vacation and find myself annoyed by literally the same guy. Time really is a flat circle.
Anyway, this follow-up doesn't concern the primary angle of that post, the reparative vs paranoid dynamic. I think what I wrote there still stands and I think I squared the circle better than I gave myself credit for. Part of this is that I don't think there really is a definitive answer to the question and that we have to live with both thoughts to survive. But the other part is that further evidence suggests that guy really, genuinely is just a big-time shit-stirrer.
The immediate subject at hand is instead definitions. In my last post I defined YIMBYs simplistically as "drill, baby, drill" but for houses. Yes, there are people who self-identify as "YIMBY" who care about and advocate for other aspects of housing and other related issues, but the braying horde of "YIMBYs" on the internet is largely not that. I know this and thus define the group as such because I've spent time reading their posts and *gasps* interacting with them. But for an outsider that doesn't waste all of their time on the internet, the most illustrative way of understanding this is probably through comprehending who YIMBYs define their enemy as. To this end, here's the guy:
There's a neat little trick here, where he defines his enemy (left-NIMBYs) as explicitly oriented on the "left", but then goes on to include groups of people who are either poorly defined on the left-right spectrum or are on the center (or even right) of it. Take city council liberals. While most big-city politicians are indeed Democrats and/or may espouse some liberal social values, I know from experience that they almost invariably do the bidding of local real estate developers (a "fun" activity is searching through your local campaign finance data and learning who all the big donors are). It's pedantic at best and actively disingenuous at worst to classify such parties as "left" (ie. anti-capitalist) when they are in place explicitly to do the bidding of capital.
But as I said, this is illuminating, specifically towards revealing what YIMBY politics is. Our acquaintance doesn't define his enemies by any fundamental material or ideological disagreement. After all, if he did, it's unlikely that he would name such a disparate group of people. Rather, his enemies are identified seemingly solely by their opposition to the specific policy of maximal/unlimited development, regardless of whether such objections are rooted in selfish interests of landowners, or concern for the greater good. Which in turns reveals that he doesn't seem to espouse any political commitments outside of that narrow interest, making my narrow stereotype of "YIMBYs" largely accurate.
And yet this all feels incomplete. Which brings me back to the original point of my previous post (twist ending!): Perhaps broad categories of people such as YIMBYs present opportunities for both paranoid and reparative analysis. Perhaps there are both bad-faith actors who are fundamentally in the pocket of developers and well-meaning allies who (correctly) understand that we need to build more housing. And perhaps, defining such a broad categorization of people primarily based on the inclinations of the former group helps to breed unnecessary suspicion of the latter group. And going one step further, perhaps this is exactly what wealthy developers want and they've "created" this band of "YIMBYs" to further this exact goal! By this logic, both paranoid and reparative readings of the situation lead me to reject the simplistic YIMBY label as I cannot find a particularly good case for its use. More updates on this matter to come.
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