It's funny there's this Minecraft mod called "Minecolonies" where you hire villagers to perform jobs, like build buildings, chop trees, craft certain blocks, even fish. What I find most interesting about it is that the most efficient way to build your village is to construct each villager's house right next to where they work.

But no one. No one ever does.

Everyone always decides "where the houses are going to be" because you, and I, and everyone under the influence of Western Civilization has lived our entire lives with zoning laws. These laws supposedly are there to prevent people from getting hurt, or poisoned, by a horrible manufacturing plant next to their house, but the purpose of a law is what it does. Cottage industry had to be forcibly destroyed, with sweet words to give them excuses for it, otherwise everyone would have a side hustle operating a business out of their garage. To trap everyone in employment only for big business, they had to convince us to stop working where we lived. That is nearly the entire function of zoning laws, because when big business wants to build next to your house, your neighborhood becomes commercial zoning, and now you're the bad guy. The laws don't stop what the ones creating them claimed they would stop, and instead make people more pliable, helpless servants.

Or, that's as close as I can figure. Buying commercially zoned real estate (hugely more expensive) is the biggest barrier to starting a business. You can't even buy it anymore, as you can see by every closed business with a "For Lease" sign. "For Lease" means some noble owns the land, and you only do business on it with their permission, for a hefty rent of course. So almost nobody owns a brick and mortar store these days, and the Internet obviously hasn't helped with that.

So this bizarre social manipulation means we don't even realize that zoning is bullshit. It's all we've ever known. We never think of doing anything differently. So when you're playing a game like Minecolonies or Timberborn, you naively create residential zones, and then sit there staring stupidly at your colony, wondering why everyone is wasting so much time pathing around. You made your workers into commuters!

#politics #rant #minecraft #vidya #society #psychology