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13/7/2016 / Online only / Text: Sebastian Olma

Van der Laan goes AirBnB: Welcome to the Political Simulacrum

In early June, Amsterdam’s mayor Eberhard van der Laan blessed his constituency from the front page of the city’s daily Het Parool with a brilliant idea: Why shouldn’t tenants of social housing be able to make a bit of cash on the side by renting out a room via the Internet platform AirBnB? His call didn’t fall on deaf ears: a couple of days later, housing corporation De Key announced they would legalise AirBnB for their tenants. 

The conservative liberals of the VVD were up in arms against this “purely leftist” idea of giving lazy social housing tenants the same rights as diligent property owners. One might be inclined to dismiss this as a knee-jerk reaction of a political camp that sees anything to do with social housing as a gateway to a communist dictatorship. However, one could also take their argument seriously and pose the question of whether Van der Laan’s initiative is indeed “purely leftists”, or, in fact, has anything to do at all with leftist or social democratic politics. 

On the face of it, Van der Laan’s initiative seems very progressive indeed. The mayor is pulling his political weight for the sake of improving the lives of the struggling masses. But what would AirBnB for social housing in fact achieve? Clearly, it would increase the income of social housing tenants. In the current economic situation, anyone would welcome such an opportunity. However, it’s not the toiling masses who would profit from AirBnB but only those fortunate enough to live in social housing. Given the on-going sale of social housing in the city, this is an increasingly exclusive group of people. Those who really suffer under the current situation – say, for instance, the youngsters who have to leave the city due to the lack of affordable housing – have nothing to gain from the mayor’s initiative. AirBnB, of course, is one of the factors that take living space off the market while simultaneously pushing rent up. Spreading it even further instead of making it illegal (as Berlin and Barcelona did recently) would make the situation even worse.  

So what’s the mayor doing here in reality? He engages in a cheap form of populism whereby he stages himself as true social democrat while fervently pushing his neoliberal agenda. Opening social housing for AirBnB is of course nothing but an attempt to further depoliticise the question of housing. If social housing is thrown onto the market, if tenants are nothing but subsidised entrepreneurs, what is the reason to have any social housing at all? This, one can be sure, is the question that will be posed very soon by those who want to transform our city into business opportunities pure and simple. Van der Laan’s intervention is an important step in this direction. 

However, the really interesting question here is: Why does he get away with this simulation of social-democratic politics. In order to find an answer to this question it makes sense to remember the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard who in the 1970s and 80s came up with the diagnosis that we had literally lost our touch with reality. Post-war, highly industrialised society, he argued, was characterised by an explosive supply of goods whose demand needed to be engineered. Advertising in conjuncture with mass media formed a new cultural technology able to reconstruct our language by producing a layer of symbolic communication on which meanings and desires could be arbitrarily connected to goods. The massive circulation of goods and their perverted symbols, Baudrillard claimed, would eventually drown reality in a sea of meaningless meaning. The (mainly commercial) proliferation of sings and symbols was wrapping the world in a semiotic veil turning reality into a simulacrum: a copy whose original had been lost.

With the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980’s and the corresponding digital revolution, Baudrillard’s simulacrum has been given a second life; this time beyond the purely symbolic dimension. Instead of reconstructing signs and symbols as advertising did (and, of course, continues to do) we have moved onto a stage of simulation whereby previously meaningful social practices are turned into bogus avatars of themselves. We have now, spread throughout our cities and towns, permanent and temporary simulacra of social change – from global TED to your local Pakhuis de Zwijger –  that in the name of “making the world a better place” engage in therapeutic gymnastics with no effect whatsoever on the world that you and I live in. This is no accident but actually intended: these simulacra of social change are institutions whose entire purpose is the prevention of real social change. Their greatest enemy is a potential political movement that would actually contest the political trajectory of neoliberalism. This is why they incessantly push technology and entrepreneurship as the only legitimate means of social change. 

OK, one could say then, if they don’t have an effect on the reality, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that while these simulacra of social change certainly don’t make the world a better place, they do help make things worse. One of their great achievements is the construction of myths such as the “sharing economy”, claiming that platform businesses such as AirBnB in some sense work for the greater good of society. And Van der Laan is now tapping into this myth and using it in order to construct his own neoliberal simulation of social democratic politics. So he is able to pretend that AirBnB for social housing is not only helping the ‘little man’, it’s also spreading the practice of ‘sharing’ and it’s innovative because it was invented in Silicon Valley. Thus, the mayor is nicely arranging his costume of a modern social democrat while in fact engaging in an extremely cynical form of anti-politics that is aimed directly against a sustainable future of our city. Welcome to Van der Laan’s political simulacrum!