The Vancouver Aquatic Centre closed its doors for good in June 2026. By this fall, the building will be gone. Demolition equipment is already lined up — the city approved a $3.5 million contract to knock it down in July, per the council's own project report.

The building is fifty years old.

Read that again. Fifty. The Aquatic Centre opened in 1976, the year the CRTC said yes to curling on television and I was two years old. It is not a ruin. It is not a safety hazard. It is a building that somebody decided, at some point, was cheaper to demolish than to paint.

And the thing that troubles me about it isn't even the building itself. It's what the decision tells us about Vancouver — because the aquatic centre is just the most visible symptom of a disease the whole city shares.

We Used to Build Things That Lasted

If you think I'm exaggerating, read the city's own paperwork. The Current State Report that accompanies Vancouver's community centre strategy — the city grading its own homework — finds that over half of the community centre inventory is rated "poor" or "very poor" on the Facility Condition Index.

Britannia, Marpole-Oakridge, Ray-Cam, and the West End centre are all in various stages of renewal planning. Hastings Community Centre scores a facility condition of nearly 26% — firmly "poor" — and carries a high seismic risk rating, in an earthquake zone, while ABC forces through budgets that save the millionaire homeowners a few dollars a month.

Then, in September 2025, the city's Auditor General made it official. His audit covered the 46 recreation facilities the ParkBoard operates — 24 community centres, 14 pools, eight rinks — and put a number on the neglect: a funding deficit of $33 million per year, part of a citywide infrastructure deficit the AG pegs at $500 million per year.

That's not a rounding error. That's a city choosing, annually, not to keep its own buildings alive.

The Aquatic Centre didn't crumble. It was allowed to fail — a slow, budgeted neglect over decades, ending with a press release about exciting new waterfront opportunities.

The Shell Game

Here's where it gets really fun. In 2014, the city took over building maintenance for the Park Board's facilities under a formal agreement. The buildings, the boilers, the leaky roofs — that became the city's job. And ever since, the city's favourite talking point has been that the Park Board hasn't done enough to keep facilities up to date.

The Auditor General, with the patience of a man who has read all the contracts, notes that while the 2014 agreement exists, there is no operating-level agreement that actually defines who is responsible for what. A decade of shared maintenance duties, no written division of labour, and endless mutual finger-pointing.

I keep reading that sentence hoping it will make sense eventually. The city holds the wrench. The city blames the other hand for having no holes in its pocket. It's like watching someone burn down a kitchen and then complaining the chef isn't cooking fast enough.

Zero Means Zero

So why does a city with one of the healthiest downtowns in North America have community centres held together with caulking? Because Vancouver underfunds itself. Deliberately.

Our property tax rate is the lowest in the entire metro area (compare it yourself) — lower than Burnaby, lower than Surrey, lower than every suburb that supposedly envies us.

We've been treating that as a badge of honour for decades instead of what it is: a fifteen-year-olds'-homework understanding of how municipal finance works. Low taxes aren't free. They compound, just like interest — except what compounds is the repair backlog.

And the current response to all this is a budget branded "Zero means Zero," which sounds decisive until you notice that the zero applies to tax increases and not to the crumbling. A tax freeze in a city with a $500 million annual infrastructure deficit isn't fiscal discipline. It's a demolition order with extra steps. You don't save the money; you just spend it later, at demolition-contract prices.

The Auditor General, again and to his credit, says the quiet part out loud: if these gaps aren't bridged with taxpayer funding, the city will have to choose which assets it keeps and which it "decommissions" — which services it simply discontinues.

Vancouver has apparently made its choice. Ask anyone who used to swim laps at the Aquatic Centre.

Who Actually Runs the Parks?

Meanwhile, the Park Board has developed a habit of signing contracts with private operators that read like they were negotiated by the operator. No rent — instead, the concessionaire pays a percentage of revenue. Sounds reasonable. It isn't. If your income is a slice of the pie, your incentive is control of the bakery, and you've paid nothing for the oven. That arrangement means for the operators of the Prospect Point Cafe if they dislikes what the Park Board is doing — say, don’t fancy a bike lane passing their business — they can simply shut the doors and wait for the city to blink.

Which, during the Stanley Park bike lane fight, is more or less what happened. A public street in a public park was effectively held hostage by the terms of a lease the public's own board signed.

Destinations, Not Cities

And then there's the philosophy underneath all of it. The Aquatic Centre replacement is the case study.

Back in 2022, Vancouverites voted in favour of borrowing $103 million for the renewal of the Vancouver Aquatic Centre — Bylaw 13442, if you want to read the fine print yourself.

Now, the ballot question itself was lawyerly about it — the wording covered "replacement, renewal or rehabilitation," a spread broad enough to drive a zamboni through.

But nobody has to guess what voters thought they were buying, because the city's own information sheet for the plebiscitespelled it out: the proposed first phase would focus on renewing the existing 50-metre lap pool and diving pool.

The 50-metre pool was the product on the shelf. That's what the brochure said. That's what people voted for.

What the city is now delivering is a 25-metre pool. Half the length. The response to "this isn't what we were told" is essentially a shrug about modern construction costs and the desire to create yet another destination by adding a water park feature to the centre.

Notice what survived the value-engineering process and what didn't. A destination on the waterfront — render-ready, ribbon-cuttable, great for tourism brochures — fits the budget. A genuine 50-metre facility, the thing the city's own materials promised as phase one, does not.

The community was sold infrastructure. The city is delivering an attraction. And this is exactly the trap the ballot wording built: borrow against a promise vague enough to mean anything, then let the meaning shrink in private, after the votes are counted. The lawyers were careful. The swimmers weren't consulted twice.

The same logic produced another example: at English Bay, the concession stand was replaced with a Cactus Club restaurant. A chain restaurant in a public park, on public land, and then — of course — the concession portion promptly closed, because the restaurant would rather you sit down and pay table prices. We traded cheap beach food for a table minimum.

Destinations photograph well. Maintenance does not. But a city is made of Tuesdays, not grand openings — of the swim lane at 6 a.m., the bench you sit on, the parent paying four dollars for a hot dog after soccer practice.

Vancouver keeps optimizing for the photograph and tourist.

What This Says About Us

The Vancouver Aquatic Centre is fifty years old and we're tearing it down. Not because it failed, but because letting it fail was cheaper than maintaining it, and because a replacement gives someone a ribbon to cut — provided the ribbon can be attached to something a little smaller than what was promised.

Zoom out and you can see the pattern: buildings we don't repair, mandates we quietly shrink, revenue we sign away, blame we redirect, and taxes we refuse to collect.

Vancouver likes to think of itself as a green, livable, world-class city.

World-class cities fund their libraries, their pools, and their community centres.

What the Aquatic Centre tells us is that we've become very good at the branding and very bad at the boring part. The wrecking balls are coming for the pool this fall. Judging by the state of the rest of the city, they'll have plenty more to do after.

The next municipal election is on Saturday, October 17, 2026.

Sources

• City of Vancouver — Community Centre Strategy
• City of Vancouver — Community Centre Strategy: Current State Report
• Office of the Auditor General — Recreation Facility Asset Management Audit (September 2025)
• Vancouver Park Board — Vancouver Aquatic Centre Demolition Contract Award Report (July 20, 2026)
• Vancouver City Council — Aquatic Centre Project Report (July 15, 2026)
• Capital Plan Plebiscite, 2022 Election (2023–2026 Capital Plan) — Information Sheet
• Consolidated Loan Bylaw No. 13442
• Property Tax Comparison — Vancouver
• Property Tax Comparison — Vancouver (WealthNorth)

Yesterday a16z published an article in which NYU Professor of Design, AI and Media Theory Ruby Thelot argued that “enshittification,” or the concept that technology platforms get worse after they lock in users, isn’t real. In reality, Thelot says, people use social media more than ever and report that they are satisfied with it. 

Thelot argues that, enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctrow which has become one of the stickiest ideas of our era to explain the current state of technology and capitalism, is a misdiagnosis of what he describes as “platform narcissism.” The idea is that people, namely older people like Doctrow and western geratric millennials who used to get a lot of value out of Facebook, selfishly think platforms should continue to cater to their needs even though they aged out of them and should be focused on raising their kids. The platforms are actually popular and well liked, but by younger people who are using Instagram and deriving value from it in a way older people can’t understand, or by people in other countries and contexts than their own. Additionally, Thelot argues, the theory of enshittification allows users who should log off an excuse to stay on platforms that it is fashionable to hate. They spend time there, but say they hate it and can’t leave because they are trapped. 

“Perhaps the reason why the platform seems worse is because your life has changed,” Thelot says. “Over the same period of time, your goals have changed, and they no longer fit with the platform’s new features. Why the hell would a fifty-five year-old be watching Reels? Go take care of your kids.”

The indisputable fact of Thelot’s argument is that various social media platforms have more users and are more profitable than ever. This data is readily available from reliable market surveys, polls, and quarterly earning reports from the companies themselves. It’s important to note that companies like Meta have a history of juking the numbers, and that despite this it recently reported its first ever decline of 20 million users, but Thelot’s point stands: Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are massively popular. 

I will also cosign Thelot’s advice that people should log off. There are many reasons why some people can’t, present company included, but it’s never not good advice and even if you have to be on social media you can probably reduce your time scrolling. 

Thelot’s argument falls apart when he tries to prove people are actually satisfied with their time on these platforms. To prove this, he points to research from American Customer Satisfaction Index, a private company which surveys customers’ satisfaction with various products and services. In its ACSI Entertainment Study 2026 it surveyed 30,886 customers and found that overall satisfaction with social media rose by 1 percent to a score of 75 out of 100. If satisfaction with social media is rising instead of falling and doesn’t have a terrible score, it’s doing the opposite of enshittifying and people don’t actually hate it, he argues.

Kudos to Thelot for finding data that appears to contradict the human civilization-wide backlash to social media and nearly the only political issue that a deeply divided country can agree on, but this is cherry picking. 

Here are the type things customers are asked to evaluate with a score of 0-100 in the survey this rising satisfaction score for social media: “Quality of mobile app, reliability of mobile app (minimal down time, crashes, lags), loading speed and reliability, ease of navigation, ease of using the site on different devices, speed and reliability of video clips, variety of services and information, freshness of content, relevance of content, ability to use site without disruption, personal relevance of ads seen.”

Customers scored all these aspects of social media highly (between 68 and 84), and I agree with their evaluation. Instagram loads really fast. I can scroll videos on TikTok very quickly. I watched one YouTube Short about Warhammer 40,000 lore, and then was served more than a dozen other YouTube Shorts about Warhammer 40,000 lore that were both fresh and relevant. I do not contest any of this and I don’t think that is why both my friends in the DSA and my Trump supporting family members agree that Instagram is bad. 

If we wanted to find out why Americans have negative feelings about social media or why we think these platforms are enshittifying, we might ask questions like: Does using Instagram make you feel good? Do you think children younger than 13 should have unlimited access to TikTok? Has Facebook been a net positive for your family?

Let’s look at some other data. A recent survey from The Searchlight institute found that voters “overwhelmingly believe social media has a negative impact on society.” Last year, anEmerson College poll found that Americans have low confidence in information they get from social media and that social media platforms are most responsible for the creation of “fake news.” In 2021, the Cato Institute found that 75 percent of Americans don’t trust social media to make fair content moderation decisions. In August, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that three in five Americans support stronger oversight of social media companies. 35 percent said social media stressed them out. 52 percent said they spend too much time on social media. A Pew poll in July found that 6 in 10 Americans supported a social media ban for kids under 16. 

These opinions, especially as they relate to the impact social media has on younger people, has nothing to do with how fast videos load on Instagram or how effective the ads are. The apps function well technically and the ads are making money, this is self-evident and the reason we have a problem. The reason people feel like social media is enshittifying is that these companies promised to connect people across the world but in reality have chased engagement, catering to basest the human urges to hold our attention. Kids especially feel socially pressured to use these apps because that’s what every other kid is doing and where they feel their community is. It is such a clearly awful and obvious result of the way these apps have enshittified that in August Meta agreed to pay $17 billion dollars in penalties and finally curb the most dangerous aspects of its platforms over claims it endangered children. 

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

There are Warhammer and cute cat videos, but every scroll is a spin of a slot machine that cycles between hate, fear, jealousy, disgust, and horniness. We all see it and no amount of pro big tech propaganda, funded by the same firm that invested in these companies is going to convince anyone otherwise. 

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican nominee for New York governor, posted an AI-generated video imagining New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Governor Kathy Hochul hanging out, bizarrely gardening together, riding bikes, and vaguely colluding about making the state unaffordable.

".@KathyHochul and @ZohranKMamdani think they can cure New York’s cost-of-living crisis with excuses, empty promises, and 'delusion pills.' The real side effects of their policies aren't a joke: 48 utility rate hikes, higher taxes, uncontrollable government spending, and businesses fleeing our state every single day," Blakeman wrote in the post on Tuesday. "I have a different plan for New York. As Governor, I will deliver zero state income tax on your first $50,000, $100,000 for joint filers, cut your utility bills in half, and end the government waste." 

ABC News10 reported that the New York State Democratic Party filed a complaint asking the Board of Elections to investigate Blakeman's use of AI in political communication materials, claiming that he's violating the state's election law that requires "materially deceptive" content to be labeled as AI-generated. 

The law states: "A person, firm, association, corporation, campaign, committee, or organization that distributes or publishes any political communication that was produced by or includes materially deceptive media and has actual knowledge that it is materially deceptive shall be required to disclose this use." The law requires a disclosure displayed directly on the media in an easily readable font saying, "This (image, video, or audio) has been manipulated."

The law carves out exceptions for "satire or parody." Blakeman seems to be invoking that clause, and told News10 that he thinks people like it. “People find it humorous. They like satire,” he said. “We’ve been using humor and satire in politics since the inception of our nation 250 years ago.”

In January, Hochul said she'd move to ban AI generated depictions of candidates in political ads within 90 days of an election. In 2025, disgraced New York governor and then-mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo's official campaign account posted an AI-generated video that showed a barrage of racist, Islamophobic stereotypes, including of his then-opponent for mayor, Mamdani. That video was labeled as AI. 

About Blakeman's AI video, Hochul’s campaign told News 10 in a statement: “While Blakeman’s resorted to straight up lying to New Yorkers, Team Hochul doesn’t need AI ads to tell them about him jacking up property taxes on Long Islanders more than once, letting violent crime hit decade highs on his watch, or running an armed MAGA militia that undercuts local cops – he did all that in real life.”

If elected, Blakeman says he'll end New York's status as a sanctuary state and increase the state's collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2024, as Nassau County Executive, Blakeman signed a bill, which he wrote, into law that banned transgender athletes from playing in women and girls' sports at county-owned athletic facilities. In 2025, courts halted that law in response to the New York Civil Liberties Union's legal challenge calling it a violation of antidiscrimination laws. 

Mein Lieblingsbohm aus Wien fragte mich neulich ob ich ein-zwei Mixe für ein Sommerfest bei sich auf Arbeit wüsste. Eher was Chilliges für einen sonnigen Nachmittag im Garten. Mir fielen die Mixe ein, die damals in den Hochzeiten der Netlabels aufgenommen habe und auch, dass ich diese lange nicht mehr gehört habe. Sehr lange nicht – immerhin sind die jetzt schon gut 20 Jahre alt, stecken aber immer noch voll mit guter Musik, die damals komplett auf allen möglichen Labels unter Creative Commons Lizenzen veröffentlicht und vertrieben wurde. Nicht wenige glaubten damals an kleine Revolution der Musikindustrie, die dann dank Streaming allerdings ganz anders kam, als wir uns das gewünscht haben.

Nun denn: weil die Musik damal allerdings zeitlos war und immer noch gut zu hören ist, habe ich die alten Tapes mal sortiert und bei SC in eine Playlist geparkt.

Fall is coming quickly, and Chillhop has the compilation to get you in the mood.

Michael Kalus posted a photo: