Facebook tasks fact checkers with tackling misinformation in the UK

Ahead of last year’s midterms, President Trump telegraphed his electoral strategy. “Hard to believe that with thousands of people from South of the Border, walking unimpeded toward our country in the form of large Caravans, that the Democrats won’t approve legislation that will allow laws for the protection of our country,” he tweeted in mid-October. “Great Midterm issue for Republicans!” To that end, he held rallies across the country, fomenting fear with racist claims about a migrant caravan that was largely made up of families fleeing violence in Central America. Trump also tweeted a veiled warning to his party: “Republicans must make the horrendous, weak and outdated immigration laws, and the Border, a part of the Midterms!”

They got the message. As the Times reported less than a week after that tweet, “Trump has not been alone in seeking to divide the electorate along racial lines this fall: As the congressional elections have approached, a number of Republican candidates and political committees have delivered messages plainly aimed at stoking cultural anxiety among white voters and even appealing to overt racism.”

The strategy failed spectacularly. The party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric may have motivated the GOP base, but not as much as it motivated Democrats and independents. The Republicans got shellacked, losing 40 seats in the House in the worst midterm defeat in history. The results can be read as nothing short of repudiation of Trump’s immigration policies.

And yet, here we are today: The Republicans have let Trump lead the country into what will soon be its longest-ever government shutdown, all over an immigration policy that voters roundly rejected last November. The party’s leaders, notably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, could break this impasse by joining with Democrats to pass a veto-proof funding bill. Instead, they continue to stick by the president, as they have done—to their increasing detriment—since he became the party’s nominee in 2016. They paid a price for doing so last year, but refuse to learn their lesson.

Republicans never truly reckoned with the midterms. Their defeat of several high-profile Democrats—Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams—and two-seat gain in the Senate allowed them to put a positive spin on the results. (Never mind that many of those candidates were long-shots, and that the Senate map was a nightmare for Democrats.) Also, more than a dozen House races weren’t certified until weeks after the election, obscuring the extent of the GOP’s losses. Much of the initial media coverage thus didn’t declare what would later become apparent: This was every bit the “blue wave” that had been predicted.

When Republican leaders finally were asked about the midterms, they made excuses. Paul Ryan, then retiring as House speaker, echoed Trump’s conspiratorial language, blaming court-ordered redistricting in Pennsylvania and California’s voting procedures. “First of all, it’s suburban voters. Pennsylvania redistricting and California just defies logic to me,” Ryan told The Washington Post in November. “This election system they have [in California], I can’t begin to understand it.” Kevin McCarthy, now the House minority leader, told his caucus that “history was against” the party, as if the defeat was fated—and said he would continue to back the president.

But mostly, Republicans have put their heads in the sand, refusing to consider the implications of the midterm results or the role the president and his immigration policy played. “There has been close to no introspection in the G.O.P. conference and really no coming to grips with the shifting demographics that get to why we lost those seats,” New York Republican Elise Stefanik told The New York Times. “I’m very frustrated and I know other members are frustrated.”

That lack of introspection has once again pushed Republicans to back the president as he advances an unpopular immigration policy supported by only a third of Americans. To an extent, they are standing behind him out of fear. Given Trump’s hounding of opponents within his own party—senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker both retired rather than run for reelection—there is some concern that stepping out of line will attract the ire of the president and his allies in conservative media, ultimately resulting in their defeat to a pro-Trump challenger in their next primary election.

But it also points to a Republican leadership that is completely neutered. Two years ago, they made what could be seen as a calculated bet. They decided to defend the president, both from the Russia investigation and from his many self-inflicted wounds, in exchange for a shot at repealing Obamacare and passing a $1.5 trillion corporate tax cut. With Democrats now in control of the House—and, again, with ample evidence that the president’s immigration policies are not popular with a majority of voters—they have little incentive to continue to stand behind the president as he prolongs his self-destructive government shutdown, especially now that 800,000 federal workers are missing a paycheck.

On Tuesday, Trump gave a nationally televised address to make his case for a border wall. It sounded exactly like the case he made before the midterms. “Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now,” he said, describing a police officer who was “savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien” and an air force veteran who was “raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history.”

And where are the Republicans? Much like last fall, they have either backed Trump publicly or kept quiet, the latter group surely hoping that this standoff will damage only the president, not the party. But this is exactly the gamble they made two months ago. Despite a wealth of evidence that the president’s immigration rhetoric and policies are broadly unpopular, McConnell, McCarthy, and the rest of Republicans in Congress are too cowardly or loyal to buck the president. It cost them dearly in 2018. It will cost them even more in 2020.

Repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results is, of course, the definition of insanity. It’s also what defines the Republican Party.

“I’m an environmental journalist, not an environmentalist.” I’ve said this countless times over the course of my career, usually to make a distinction between myself and the people I write about. But last year, while reporting on a growing number of climate crises, I realized I could no longer pretend that I was just a journalist. I am an environmentalist, in the sense that I believe humans should modify their behavior for the benefit of the planet. I just hadn’t acted much on that belief—until now.

I started eating mostly vegetarian. I bought a metal straw. And, most importantly, I changed how I got my fruits and vegetables.

The latter was most important to me. I wanted to do my part in the fight against food waste. Every year in America, between 30 to 40 percent of food available for consumption goes uneaten. The majority of that is thrown away at home and at restaurants, but anywhere from 11 to 16 percent—about 20 billion pounds—comes from farms that can’t find buyers for their products. Some research suggests about half of all produce grown in the country goes to waste. It’s an economic, environmental, and moral offense.

I considered enrolling in a community-supported agriculture program, or CSA, where members pre-pay for a share in a local farm. But then I learned about Hungry Harvest, a company that buys up excess or “ugly” produce from growers and wholesalers around the country and sells it to consumers for less than supermarket price.

According to the company’s website, Hungry Harvest “rescues at least 10 pounds of fruits and veggies from going to waste.” In a world where individual action can feel pointless, this felt tangible. If I received a Hungry Harvest box every other week, I reasoned, I’d be saving 260 pounds of fruits and vegetables from being wasted every year. And even if I wound up throwing away half of my box, it would still be a net environmental benefit because the produce would have been thrown away otherwise—or so I thought.

I felt a twinge of pride when, every other Sunday morning, an orange-and-brown cardboard box showed up in the mailroom of my apartment building. I would bring it upstairs and marvel at its contents: tiny avocados, bruised pears, hilariously oversized eggplants. I’d arrange the strange produce in bowls on my dining room table. 

After a few months, I started noticing orange-and-brown cardboard boxes everywhere. They were piling up in my mailroom and appearing on my neighbors’ doorsteps. Hungry Harvest ads started appearing in my Instagram and Facebook feeds, and ads for a competing food waste delivery company, Imperfect Produce, even popped up while I was swiping on Tinder. 

The “ugly produce” movement had been monetized, and it was becoming a big business. On balance, that seemed like a positive development. If companies could find a way to profit from unwanted food, maybe there was an economically sustainable solution to this crisis. But after looking deeper into these companies, I now question the entire concept of “rescuing” excess produce for profit. I even wonder whether the planet would be better off if I threw the next orange-and-brown box in the trash.

Food waste doesn’t make many headlines, but it’s one of the biggest environmental problems in the United States. Every year, 30 million acres of cropland, 4.2 trillion gallons of water, and nearly two billion pounds of fertilizer are used to grow food that’s never eaten, according to a recent study. The latter is particularly concerning since nitrogen-based fertilizer is a major cause of water contamination and a significant emitter of greenhouse gases.

In fact, reducing food waste is “one of the most important things we can do to reverse global warming,” according to Chad Frischmann, policy director of the climate solutions group Project Drawdown. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Frischmann wrote that reducing food waste will ultimately require American consumers to “embrace ‘ugly food’—fruits and vegetables that are blemished and not perfectly shaped but are perfectly delicious and nutritious.” 

More consumers are doing just that. Founded in 2014, Hungry Harvest was propelled by a $100,000 investment through the popular TV series Shark Tank. It now delivers boxes in six cities on the East Coast, and CEO Evan Lutz says he plans to expand the business “to 30 more cities over the next four years.” Imperfect Produce—founded in 2015 by one of Lutz’s original business partners, Ben Simon—serves 10 West Coast cities, as well as Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Simon envisions Imperfect delivering in “all major metropolitan centers on the East Coast by the end of 2020.” NBA superstar Kevin Durant recently announced an investment in the company. 

As these delivery services have grown, though, so have their critics. In an op-ed last year for The New Food Economy, the heads of two food-justice nonprofits in Oakland wrote that Imperfect Produce “reflects a very troubling trend ... that commodifies and gentrifies food waste.” The company, they argued, is not in the business of food waste so much food surplus: It buys excess products that farmers can’t sell to supermarkets, but could sell to restaurants, canned and processed food companies, or, as a last resort, donate to food banks. “The stuff in these boxes is not ending up in a landfill,” co-author Max Cadji, the founder of Phat Beets Produce, told me. “They’re just tapping into the same marketplace as the guys who make shredded carrots.” 

If the vegetables inside these boxes were never destined for the landfill, then the growth of ugly-produce companies threatens to make the food waste problem worse, according to co-author Eric Holt-Gimenez, the executive director of Food First. The companies, while well-intentioned, are now competing with the other players in the surplus market, incentivizing farmers to overproduce to meet that demand.  “The reason we have so much waste in the first place is because of overproduction,” Holt-Gimenez said. “This is a way to capitalize on overproduction and increase the flow of waste.”

The solution to food waste, then, is not to normalize and monetize ugly produce. It’s to create a system where excess food isn’t produced in the first place. How can venture capital-backed companies contribute to that goal when they profit from industrial agriculture’s overproduction? Wouldn’t the growth of these companies, in fact, make the problem worse by providing yet more reason to overproduce? 

I put these questions to the founders of Hungry Harvest and Imperfect Produce.

“Honestly, the criticisms are a bit surprising,” Ben Simon said in a 90-minute phone interview last week. Some people might not trust a for-profit, venture capital–backed company to act with the planet’s best intentions in mind, he said, but they should trust the results: In the last three years, Imperfect Produce claims to have saved 30 million pounds of food and 900 million gallons of water from being wasted. 

Simon thinks Holt-Gimenez and Cadji are ignoring these positive results, and pointed me to a blog post where he responded to his critics. “We are saving good produce from rotting on fields, paying hard working farmers a fair price for it, and helping middle and working class people save money on healthy produce,” he wrote. “To me, calling that ‘commodifying food waste’ is a gross misrepresentation of the heart of this problem, which is good food not getting eaten, and a negligent dismissal of the climate implications if we don’t do something about it.”

Simon did concede to two points: that Imperfect Produce sources from large-scale industrial producers, like Dole, and that not all of their fruits and vegetables are destined for the landfill. “We’ve been transparent from the beginning that a small portion of the produce we buy may have had a previous market, and may not have been wasted,” he said, adding that non-wasted food only accounts for about 5 to 10 percent of their products. “It’s really a minority of it.”

Lutz, of Hungry Harvest, said the company also sources from agribusiness, but only sparingly. “I don’t have the exact figure for how much comes from Big Ag, however we define that,” he said. “I can tell you it’s not a lot.” The average farm the company buys from is under 500 acres, he said, and he insisted that all of the fruits and vegetables in Hungry Harvest boxes would have gone to waste, either by getting thrown out, composted, or left in the field.

But how does Lutz know that? How can Hungry Harvest promise that a farmer wasn’t going to sell her bruised cucumbers to a different surplus company, or donate it to a food bank? “It’s based on trust between us and the supplier,” he said. 

Lutz put me in touch with one of those suppliers: Andrew Rose, whose family founded North Carolina’s New Sprout Organic Farms in 2011. Before Hungry Harvest approached the medium-size company in 2016, Rose said, “a lot of times our stuff would get left in the field.” Now, Hungry Harvest has created a market for that surplus—as well as produce that gets rejected by supermarket buyers. For example, Rose said, he recently sent 300 pounds of watermelon radishes to a big grocery store, only to have it sent back because of decay that happened in-transit. “The first thing we did was call Hungry Harvest,” Rose said. “The timing was crazy, but we wound up getting 50 cents on the dollar on it, where we wouldn’t have gotten anything on it.” 

But Rose also made a surprising acknowledgement: Not all of the food New Sprout Farms sells to Hungry Harvest was going to waste before the service came along. In most cases, Rose said, “We donated it to food banks.” New Sprout even received an award from one local food bank in 2012 for donating 85,000 pounds of produce, he said. “We still donate a lot to food banks—quite a lot,” Rose said. (Manna Food Bank, which gave the award, confirmed they still receive donations from New Sprout). The big difference is that now, “Hungry Harvest allows us to offset some of our costs.”

Lutz says this offsetting of farmers’ costs is what’s important. “I define the [food waste] problem not as overproduction, but as misallocation,” he said. “We’ve got 20 billion pounds of food that go to waste on farms every year, and 41 million Americans who are hungry. That’s a vast misallocation of resources. There should be a way that we can get those people food while helping farmers make money off of it.” Lutz says Hungry Harvest has paved that way. “We buy that surplus food from farms that they wouldn’t be selling otherwise, sell it to customers, and using those funds, we subsidize donations [to food banks].” 

This is a compelling argument that ugly-produce companies helps farmers. It does not, however, address the environmental argument: that such companies are incentivizing large-scale agribusiness to continue overproducing. Lutz and Simon could quell these concerns by disclosing all the farms and wholesalers they use, making it possible to fact-check their claims. But neither company will disclose that information. 

“We’ve explored being transparent about the farms, but some of our farms don’t want to be broadcast for whatever reason,” Lutz said. Simon, meanwhile, claimed producers don’t want their brands to be associated with misshapen goods, adding that it’s not particularly business-savvy to disclose one’s suppliers. “Competitors would love to know all of our growers,” he said. “We need to be competitive as a business.”

Companies like Hungry Harvest and Imperfect Produce portray themselves as disrupters of a broken food system, but critics say they may actually be disrupting something else: CSAs.

Community-supported agriculture programs are, in a way, the original ugly-produce companies. Customers pay for a share in their local farm, usually before the farmer plants anything. The farmer then knows exactly how much to plant. The customer assumes some of the risk—it’s possible that they won’t receive abundant or beautiful produce, depending on the year—while the farmer is financially protected if she suffers a bad harvest. And, of course, it keeps food waste to a minimum.

In his New Food Economy op-ed, published last August, Cadji claimed that his organization’s CSA had seen a 30 percent drop in customers since Imperfect Produce came to Oakland. When we spoke in December, he said the loss was “probably closer to 50 or 60 percent.” He can’t prove the decline is because people decided to switch to Imperfect Produce. But CSAs in other cities where Imperfect is thriving are reporting similar wariness to what they see as a fierce market competitor. 

Cadji also believes Imperfect Produce is doing “sneaky little things to undercut CSAs”—like, for example, advertising itself as a “CSA Style Box.” He said this is misleading, and has the potential to lure away potential CSA customers who believe they’re signing up for something similar. Simon, for his part, defended the characterization. Like CSAs, he said, “We eliminate a step between the grower and households.”

Still, Simon said he doesn’t see Imperfect Produce as competing with CSAs. Lutz says the same about Hungry Harvest, and even offered proof: a survey the company took of its customer base in August, which found that only 1 in 10 had ever used a food delivery service before. “So I don’t think our customers are switching from CSAs to us,” he said.

But how many customers, like me, had signed up because they were searching for a way to solve the environmental epidemic of food waste, and chose Hungry Harvest over a local CSA? 

“I don’t have a ton of data on that choice,” Lutz said.

In the weeks following their New Food Economy op-ed, Cadji and Holt-Gimenez said, they received a lot of support for their critiques. “People had never thought about what it meant to tackle the systemic problem of food waste before,” Holt-Gimenez said. At the same time, he added, “A lot of people accused us of having a case of sour grapes. Like, why can’t you just be happy with their success? Why do you have to try and ruin something good?”

These are legitimate questions, because companies like Hungry Harvest and Imperfect Produce are doing tangible good. They’re giving organic family farms like New Sprout Organic increased financial security. They’re using their proceeds to fight hunger and provide well-paying jobs. They’re challenging grocery stores’ silly aesthetic standards. They’ve prevented millions of pounds of food from going to waste. 

But what if all of these benefits make it harder to achieve an even greater good? Is it worth saving ten million pounds of fruit and vegetables a year if doing so perpetuates their systemic overproduction?

I don’t believe the founders of Imperfect Produce and Hungry Harvest are cravenly exploiting their customers’ do-goodism for financial gain. They seem genuine about wanting to solve one of our most complex environmental problems. But Cadji and Holt-Gimenez’s criticism is valid and necessary. Humanity only has about a decade to take the necessary steps to avoid a climate catastrophe. We need radical, not incremental, solutions—and that includes a complete overhaul of the food system. 

This, ultimately, is why I’m ditching my orange-and-brown box. I became a Hungry Harvest customer because I wanted to do my part to reduce food waste. But I can’t be sure that I’m doing more good than harm. Am I preventing pounds of produce from going to waste, or propping up the very system that I’m trying to help fix? I won’t be haunted by these questions when I get my first delivery from my local CSA.

The coupled protagonists of Georges Perec’s materialist parable Things, Jerome and Sylvie, are 24 and 22 years old, both conductors of marketing interviews. Their dearest dream is to live in a Parisian apartment with a successfully bourgeois interior—charmingly untidy with floor-to-ceiling cabinetry, worn black leather sofa, roll-top desk—while in reality they inhabit a tiny, low-ceilinged space that they can’t bring themselves to do anything about. “They would have liked to give themselves to something, to feel in themselves some powerful need that they would have called a vocation,” Perec wrote. “But they possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them.”

Jerome and Sylvie would have made perfect participants for a slew of new reality television shows focused chiefly on the anxieties of domestic space in late capitalism, when our identities are even more wrapped up in our possessions and the quality of rooms than when Perec wrote his story in 1965. Our rented apartments in gentrifying urban neighborhoods must be evacuated of old possessions, repopulated with upscale generic start-up furniture, and then temporarily sublet to pay the rising rent. It’s exhausting. 

In Tidying Up, the pixieish Japanese cleaning celebrity Marie Kondo might help you find new organizational strategies while breaking your dependence on all the junk that doesn’t “spark joy.” The Australian Instant Hotel and British Stay Here both turn Airbnb into a competitive art form. The latter sees a pair of designers renovate participants’ properties into ideal listings for the platform while the former sets loose a raucous group of Australian couples who all stay in and evaluate each other’s home rentals. Like HGTV without the concept of total home ownership, the shows betray the fact that our domestic spaces are less our own than ever. Instead of homes, we live in commodities. 

Marie Kondo’s two books, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (published in the United States in 2014) and sequel Spark Joy (2016), have sold many millions of copies all over the world. Kondo signed her first book deal after taking a course in Tokyo, titled “How to write bestsellers that will be loved for ten years,” which she did. The books rely less on specific content than their simple framework and the undeniable magnetism of their author. The instructions Kondo gives are, roughly: Stack all your stuff into massive piles; evaluate one by one whether your items spark joy; throw out anything that doesn’t, and organize the rest. Fold it in thirds, organize it so you can see it all at once, and store it in open boxes, which get put inside other boxes (Kondo now sells her own boxes for $89).

In the Netflix show, fittingly released on the cusp of a new year, Kondo acts as a kind of traveling doctor, visiting California homes alongside her translator in order to put occupants through her trademark KonMari Method. She is trim and bright, outfitted in antiseptic white tops, with a wide smile optimistic enough to irradiate clutter—an emissary from a better, cleaner universe. “The goal is to cherish everything that you have so you can achieve happiness for your family, so you can live comfortably,” she says. The enemy is mess, which Kondo professes to love in a kind of Freudian way. Her eyes light up when she sees her new clients’ overflowing closets and impenetrable spare bedrooms.   

The show is more interesting for its unveiling of couple and family dynamics than it is for any clear instruction in the art of tidiness. In its first (and best) episode, Rachel and Kevin Friend, a hip-looking young couple with two toddlers, confront the excess in their Lakewood house. Deeper issues quickly emerge. “I want to appreciate what I have instead of needing more things,” Rachel admits, suffering the inherent trauma of capitalism. Kevin is annoyed that Rachel refuses to do laundry. “I hope that this will get out of the way the things that are keeping us from enjoying each other,” he says. “Couples can deepen their ties through tidying,” Kondo observes. Indeed, the cleaning ordeal brings the pair together. Getting rid of the kids’ overflowing clothes makes it easier for Rachel to get them dressed, and the lack of mess helps Kevin grit his teeth slightly less and be a “good dad” when he gets home from work. 

The show’s intimacy lends it a YouTube-ish authenticity: Its subjects actually film themselves over the month-long process and the phone footage is interspersed with camera-crew work. Yet as soon as I recognized the episode structure, I wanted to fast-forward to the inevitable tears. Men who realize they have to give up their sneaker or baseball-card collections. The woman who admits to retail therapy as a form of revenge. The widow who has to sort through her late husband’s shirts in order to take up a new life of traveling and create a craft room in her plush McMansion. More than a clean house, Kondo gives her subjects a new sense of themselves.

Unlike, say, HGTV’s Fixer Upper in which we see reinvented structures, there isn’t much of a satisfying reveal at the climax of these episodes. Clothes have been folded, kitchen appliances aligned, and books jettisoned, causing consternation among literary watchers. (Kondo gives a lesson relevant to the fake news era: “Books are the reflection of our thoughts and values, so by tidying books it will show you what kind of information is important to you at this moment.”) The subjects are generally enthused at their new, joy-sparked lives, but it is a minimalist process of refinement rather than renovation. Progress is abstract, which is one reason the episodes could have been half as long.

The commandment to think carefully about what you own isn’t so radical, after all. “Sparking joy” still relies on material goods to form the basis of an identity: Each object must feel like it is an ineffable part of you, as if your old T-shirts emitted a Benjaminian aura. It’s not about taking up meditation or therapy; Kondo is advocating for something as close to perfect consumption as possible. The idea that things don’t matter is anathema to KonMari.

If Kondo wants you to throw out everything that doesn’t feel personal, then Instant Hotel and Stay Here emphasize getting rid of personal effects in order to make the domestic space as generic as possible, the better to profitably enter it into the sharing economy, in which strangers will have to feel like it is their home as well.

Stay Here, another Netflix original production, is the highest-budget and most fun of the group in a hate-watch, eat-the-rich kind of way—it could be used for DSA radicalization sessions. Its tagline is “Makeover. Make money.” HGTV star Genevieve Gorder, a charming designer, and Peter Lorimer, a slick British music producer turned celebrity realtor, take properties that are being rented on Airbnb or the more luxe platform VRBO and renovate them so that they are better short-term rentals: the best Airbnb they can be. 

Their chief goals are to raise the nightly rental price and occupancy rates. They crunch the numbers on-screen, reassuring the property owners that they will recoup all their mortgage and maintenance expenses plus a tidy profit. They achieve this by bringing in faux-mid century furniture, building out the same open kitchen you see in every new condo development, and adding a “social media moment,” some Instagrammable object or mural wall that will prompt guests to do your marketing for you. In Austin, it’s a geometric pattern painted on the poolhouse; in Palm Springs, it’s a period-piece 1970s room covered in pink upholstery. Gorder is ecstatic.

Let us consider the case of one gentleman who bought a disused firehouse in Washington, D.C., and turned it into his own apartment as well as an Airbnb. He lived in the huge loft space behind two floor-to-ceiling arched windows and rented out the darkened caverns in the rest of the building, which were filled with furniture barely worthy of a frat house. Gorder and Lorimer obviously kicked him out of the nice part of the house—you have to prioritize the guests—and opened the bright loft to the rest of the space.

It turns out that the firehouse was the first African-American firehouse in the city, opened because black firemen were having trouble getting promoted by racist white officers. Instead of, say, turning some part of it into a public space, Gorder fetishizes its heritage with bunk beds made of fire-poles and a vintage photo mural of the garage in its active days. “Now you can sleep in a piece of history!” Thus authenticity is commodified as #DCfirehouse4, $850 a night. Also not mentioned is the threat of gentrification that families of wealthy tourists pose to the historically African-American neighborhood. 

In Stay Here, we might observe certain rules for an optimized Airbnb. You need to have as many bedrooms as possible, because “heads in beds” make money. Don’t think of it as a home; “you have to think like the GM of a small hotel,” bringing a strong business plan. Key to the process is what Gorder persists in calling “depersonalization”: removing any artifacts like family photos or mementos so that guests won’t feel like they’re in someone else’s life. Depersonalization also happens to be the clinical term for a psychological disorder in which you feel detached from yourself, like a robot. It seems apt. The Stay Here thesis is not that by remaking your house you might be happier; it is that you will be wealthier. “I’m going to crush my competition,” a man in Austin enthuses in a fit of post-renovation real estate Darwinism.

Homes were not competition until sharing-economy platforms gamified them with revenue charts and star ratings. Instant Hotel gamifies the gamification. The show originally aired in Australia in 2017 before Netflix picked it up. Two sessions of five Australian couples who have turned their houses into rental properties (“instant hotels”) go on a kind of national road trip, staying together at every other couple’s rental and then evaluating it, often viciously, like a mobile Big Brother. The categories are Design, Location & Attractions, Night’s Sleep, and Value; grand prize is a trip to California to stay in a famous Airbnb that might belong to a celebrity. 

Personality is the problem. One couple is derided for their collection of 1950s American kitsch, another for their profusion of fake flowers, still another for the shower in the master bathroom with a full-length window you can’t block. When your home is a commodity, nothing unique or quirky is allowed. The winner of the entire competition is a “Zen” retreat that looks as inoffensive as humanly possible. Yet the show’s only appealing element is personality. It’s fun to watch for Australianisms. The group goes to a rural pub, races cane toads, and spears mud crabs. It did not make me want to travel there.

Maybe the issue is that these shows are too relevant, hovering on the border of entertainment and twenty-first-century economic survivalism. Years after its peak, Kondo-ing once again took over the Internet in the past week as viewers posted photos of their socks neatly aligned in drawers. I wondered if anything I owned truly sparked joy. Then again, if I suddenly couldn’t afford my rent, I could just ditch everything with a whiff of personality, then install bunk beds, pendant lights, and an Instagram wall with a hashtag decal and let my apartment monetize itself, right?

What these reality shows really point to is the need for rent control and tenants’ rights, a world in which we don’t have to repackage our homes in order to keep them. I propose outlawing private property and giving everyone 365 Airbnb credits a year instead.

Perec’s Jerome and Sylvie never find their way out of materialism either, despite abandoning Paris briefly for Tunisia. They return to France and find executive advertising jobs with salaries better suited to their tastes. “They will have their chesterfield settee,” Perec writes. “They will have huge and empty rooms full of light; plenty of clearance, glass panels, magnificent outlook.” Sounds nice, I’d stay there.

the weight of certain news
on the phone
that makes the receiver heavier
makes it fall from my hands

the pointless weight of certain things:
metal pieces in abandoned lots

the curved posture of my father
who after years,
has yet to take my brother’s corpse
off his shoulders
and place him on the ground

we need to acknowledge
to bear right

after all, how many more minutes
can we continue walking
the middle of this highway?

the blaring horns make me lonelier
and lonelier
and lonelier

why do you bury the one who is left alone?

no death is natural
this poem won’t make it to the hospital