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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

InternetMarch 8, 2022

Are tech platforms causing extra headaches for renters?

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

Services like Renti are meant to make things easier for landlords and tenants alike, but some worry renters are losing out as a result. Dylan Reeve explores for IRL

Comedian and podcast raconteur Tim Batt is moving house. Such is the life of a renter. And, as part of the cursed process of applying for rental property in Aotearoa, Batt found himself completing a tenancy application form via Renti, an Auckland-based rental application management website.

A few steps into the process Batt was stopped in his tracks when Renti offered him the opportunity to upgrade to a “verified profile” for the low one-off price of $25. As a jaded millennial, resigned to forever being at the mercy of landlords, Batt naturally assumed the worst: that paying the fee would win preferential treatment. “Psychologically, you want to take any opportunity to get ahead of the pack, and this gives you the belief that somehow you’re getting in front of people to take the free option,” suggested Batt, with a hint of conspiratorial suspicion. 

As with every aspect of our lives, home rental is increasingly becoming appified, with websites and apps being marketed to property managers to streamline their interactions with tenants. But is Batt’s suspicion about tenants being shaken down by software middlemen justified? And even if it isn’t, are these tech developments in the interests of tenants, or is it just another situation where the mismatched power dynamic of renting means they’re dragged along for the ride?

As for Batt’s concern about being at the bottom of the heap as a lowly free user, Will Alexander, Renti’s CEO, is very clear: no one is getting ahead of anyone else. “It’s an optional feature,” Alexander said flatly, before explaining that its main selling point is that it allows prospective tenants to pre-register a credit report and ID records. Usually, when a prospective tenant becomes the preferred applicant all the vetting still needs to be done, he explained. With Renti’s verified tier “it gives the tenant an opportunity to do it themselves”.

One advantage to tenants, according to Alexander, was the ability to avoid the need for multiple credit checks if an applicant ended up reaching the “preferred applicant” stage for multiple properties. “The more times you get a credit check done, it actually affects your credit score.”

Comedian Tim Batt has raised concerns about services like Renti. (Photo: supplied)

While Alexander may frame the service as a benefit to tenants, others have been critical of the downsides. A November 2021 story from Stuff raised the issue of optional applicant fees on both Renti’s and Trade Me’s application platforms. Since that time, Trade Me has wrapped up their internal rental application process, choosing to partner with Renti for the feature going forward. But according to Renti’s Alexander, the optional fees are on their way out anyway.

“It’s 90% [likely] that it’s going to drop off because we can only collect so much information now,” said Alexander, referring to recent guidance from the privacy commissioner that will mean significant changes in the way rental applications have to be handled. 

The changes that will likely see the paid option retired come after ongoing criticism about excessive data collection within the industry. Both Renti and its largest local rival, Tenancy Practice Services (TPS) who operate tenancy.co.nz and tenant.co.nz, have faced a shake-up from the privacy commissioner after ongoing complaints that they, and property managers generally, were collecting too much information from applicants. The new system, which both companies expect to roll out in March, will see the applications handled as a multi-step process, only collecting necessary information as applicants advance through their application. 

Renti and TPS both handle only the first stage of the rental process, from viewing through to signing a rental agreement. After that, the rest of the rental relationship is handed over to whichever tools property managers and landlords are using to manage their properties. 

Cameron Jenkins, of the Manawatu Tenants Union, sees some risks with the growth of technology in the rental market. “We’re dealing with a lot of digital poverty … it’s quite a big barrier,” said Jenkins, of sections of the population who don’t have access to necessary technology. “Older populations and rural sectors are a concern. You’ve got people who’ve lived out in the country all their lives and need to retire into the city, and they can’t because the services aren’t there and they don’t know how to use the internet.”

Jenkins added, however, that tech platforms can also offer clear benefits for tenants such as broader communication options and clearer record keeping, something that can be hugely beneficial if disputes arise later. “You use an app – the tenant has it, the landlord has it, communication is done via the app so it’s recorded as a formal document.”

Bricks and Agent app co-founder Rafael Niesten says tech brings advantages for renters, too. (Photo: supplied)

One business focused on delivering a tenant-friendly services is Australian company Bricks and Agent, which offers a product that allows property managers, owners, tenants and tradespeople to connect in order to address maintenance issues in rental properties. “Tenants are busy and there’s younger people moving in all the time who aren’t used to having to sit on phone calls and send emails that don’t get responded to because agencies are too busy,” said co-founder Rafael Niesten. “They are used to that Uber-isation where, at 12:30 in the morning, they say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a leaking tap’ and they just want to put in that request and someone will deal with it.” 

For property managers these tools offer benefits in record keeping and compliance, as well as efficiency. Like Jenkins, the companies argue that tenants also see benefits, thanks to a more streamlined relationship with their property manager and features like multi-platform interactions (tenants can log requests using SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and more) and in-app translation.

But as every aspect of our lives seems to be subsumed into one app or another, is all this tech asking too much of tenants?

Tenant advocate Jenkins is optimistic about what technology brings, but warns about some being left behind. “For those who can [use technology] it’s going to be wonderful, but we also need to have the ability for those who can’t access technology to participate. It shouldn’t be a hindrance.”

“The technology works really well when done right, and when connected to other systems,” said Niesten. “Where it doesn’t work well is when you have a tenant who has to have seven mobile apps on their phone to do what they need to do.”

The growth of tenant-facing technology in the rental industry seems inevitable, as it is everywhere else. It still seems to be at an early stage and has the potential to make rental relationships better, but there is also the very real risk that we find ourselves in the technological hell of competing apps, technologies and platforms.

The overarching concern is who is going to benefit, and how. “I like technology,” Batt said, “but there’s such a huge power imbalance in rentals that I worry about how [tech] might make that worse.”

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Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

InternetMarch 4, 2022

Memeing our way through the war in Ukraine

Image: Archi Banal
Image: Archi Banal

As war broke out in Ukraine last week, so did the memes. Have we always coped with conflict this way? Josie Adams investigates for IRL.

If the Vietnam War was the “television war”, Ukraine could be the “TikTok war”. While we’ve seen front-line footage shot by soldiers and civilians for decades now, the way we’re seeing the Ukraine-Russia war play out is different from how we watched other recent conflicts. We saw Facebook posts from soldiers in Iraq, and live streams from the Arab Spring and the London riots, but for most us watching Ukraine, social media has almost entirely replaced news streams. 

We’re learning the political complexities of the situation through social media. Across multiple devices and apps we can watch airstrikes in Kyiv, laugh at Ukrainian farmers joking with out-of-gas Russian soldiers, and thirst over edits of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. We’re consuming tank-driving instruction manuals, slice-of-life portraits, and Politics 101-style explainers. All these things – serious and trivial alike – are spat out at us in quick succession by algorithms making it difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between meme and reality.

The classic panel format has resurfaced after last week’s invasion.

Ex-comedian, Dancing the Stars winner, and current president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskiy is at the core of many of these memes; he’s on the front lines of the war, refused to be evacuated by the US, and once played piano with his penis on national television. He is, to many internet denizens, the ultimate chad. On the other hand, Russian president Vladimir Putin is an equally compelling character; but is it normal to reduce these two world leaders to caricatures? 

Ridiculing presidents might seem very modern, but it’s a wartime tradition; memes are the offspring of newspaper cartoons, which have a long history of making fun of our enemies. But should we be laughing at memes about something as serious as war? And do we still make our little jokes to rouse spirits, or has TikTok changed the reason we meme?

Incel memes have been repurposed for the Ukraine war, naturally.

One man who knows about the newspaper traditions memes were born from is David Monger, a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury. He’s an expert in propaganda and patriotism in First World War Britain. He can see how people might draw parallels between how newspapers portrayed Kaiser Wilhem II back then to how we’re depicting Putin today. “It’s an understandable reaction to diminish a deeply troubling character in that way,” he said. “The point is to belittle the enemy and thus make them more beatable.”

The newspaper cartoons of yesteryear and the Facebook memes of today have plenty in common: they simplify and they demystify scary or unintelligible things. Napoleon Bonaparte was famously victim to caricatures by his enemies; even today many of us believe he was a hilariously short man. He was, at 1.68m, actually pretty tall for his time.

Napoleon (right) is depicted as a short man in a ‘meme’ of yore. (Image: ‘The Plumb-Pudding in Danger’, James Gillray, 1805.)

For most of us, our social media feeds will be depicting Putin as the enemy. Our apps know we’re westerners, and likely to be pro-Ukraine, even though we probably have very little skin in the game. “Making jokes about enemies, I imagine, is as old as having enemies,” said Monger. “I’m not sure how this compares to us making a meme about Ukraine when we’re at no risk from Russia at the moment. But I think the principle is probably similar.”

He’s right: here in New Zealand, we are not facing a Russian invasion. But we are seeing a huge amount of information, designed to be extremely shareable, on all our devices. Knowing how to separate meme, fact, and propaganda is more vital than ever. Our feeds are full of front-line TikToks, some of which are fabricated. Twitter and Facebook have been struggling with Russian sock puppet accounts and troll farms for years. We are not in the line of fire, but being extremely online means needing to avoid being sucked into the information war; with every Twitter retweet and shared Instagram story, we risk spreading disinformation. 

Spreading information, whether it’s correct or not, is more of a priority for today’s memesters than it was for the wartime cartoonists. The aim of First World War cartoonists was to stir up war support and morale, but today’s creators are usually just trying to expand their own audiences. TikTok user Marta Vasyuta has been uploading footage of the Russian invasion on her account, and it’s clear she gets the most views when a trending sound is attached to the video. This clip of what she says is a vacuum bomb has 385,000 views. But her video of an airstrike in Kyiv is set to one of the biggest TikTok sounds of the year, MGMT’s song ‘Little Dark Age’, and has 49 million views.

Monger said writers, artists and propagandists have always had opportunities in wartime. “There was money to be made,” he said. “The National War Aims Committee paid writers and artists to produce material for them.” Some of the wartime humourists would go on to have successful artistic careers: Poy, HM Bateman, and Punch magazine all ended up in the history books. 

The famously homphobic Putin surely would not invade Ukraine unless he were gay.

Newspapers still employ political cartoonists and humourists to skewer our enemies, but meme creators generally have no editorial oversight. There is no drive to share correct or even funny information; the point is just to share as much as possible. Accounts called “war pages” are making the most of footage to grow their audiences. As Russia dropped its first missiles, a now-deleted Instagram page called @livefromukraine began posting as though it was run by someone on the ground. It wasn’t; it was run by a meme admin in the US. He was creating a niche version of Instagram’s broader war-based accounts that collect footage of conflicts across the world and share them to gain followers and, eventually, money.

There will always be opportunists out to make a little cash from tragedies, but most of us are memeing responsibly… right? “Away from the sight of it, what’s funny to you with nothing at stake isn’t necessarily funny to someone with family in the region, or someone actually involved in the war,” said Monger.

But despite our physical distance, we remain in close proximity to all the grisly footage and details of the war. Perhaps creating caricatures of Zelenskiy and Putin can help diminish the troubling nature of what we’re watching.

Monger said that while reducing complex geopolitical issues to a couple of panels might seem distasteful, the concept is basically human nature. “Humour is a way of dealing with very unpleasant things,” he said. “When you get a nasty fright you shriek, and then make a joke of it most of the time.”

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