The seeking of potential rents directs flows of investment into built and natural environments, suffusing volatility into urban and rural landscapes, generating gentrification and other forms of land use change, and displacing lives and livelihoods to make space for ‘improvement’, ‘highest and best use’, ‘revitalization’, or the like. In this paper we argue that potential rents are captured at the cost of potential lives, and that rent gap theory, long central (and limited) to gentrification theory, is more widely applicable to the dynamics of land use change and uneven geographical development in capitalist societies. By reading David Harvey’s analyses of rent and accumulation by dispossession as a sophisticated formulation of rent gap theory, we relate the seeking and capturing of potential rents to the power of landed developer interests and a broadened conceptualization of rentiership. We furthermore relate the seeking of potential rents to an ideology of limitless accumulation, and the striving to rein in potential rents to ideas of degrowth and the need for a culture and a politics of limits. Brief vignettes from the ‘primary sector’ (fisheries in the Baltic Sea, dairy farming in Europe, and small-scale farming in Sweden) suggestively illustrate our central argument that the seeking and capturing of potential rents stand in stark opposition to potentials for wellbeing and flourishing of human and non-human lives. We conclude that constraining potential rents – founded as they are on faith in limitless growth – requires a culture of self-limitation and politically imposed limitations commensurable with post-capitalist societies.

This article addresses issues surrounding the social construction of internet addiction, focusing on conceptualisations of reality, escape, hope, and time. Drawing on a critical realist account of semiosis, the framing of internet addiction in China is analysed using the documentary film Web Junkie as an empirical pivot and point of departure. A contextual overview of relations, interests, and tensions surrounding youth and the internet in China is provided, and the film Web Junkie is briefly presented. The main body of the article consists of a critical analysis of conceptualisations of “reality” and “escape.” The core tension focused on in the analysis is the struggle over time, necessitating engagement with critical thought on hope and utopia. The analysis concludes that struggles over temporal autonomy underlie conflicting claims about “reality” and “escape” that are central to “internet addiction” and its treatment in China today.

This article examines the potential of digital welfare policies and practices to enhance the wellbeing of children in China, and the congruencies and contradictions of such policies with sustainable welfare. Can child welfare be supported digitally in ways that are not environmentally destructive? The rapidly diffusing concepts of digital welfare and sustainable welfare are presented, emphasising aspects of precarity, connectivity, surveillance, polarisation and environmental degradation. The context of child welfare and digital welfare policies in China is outlined and considered from the perspective of sustainable welfare. Given the underlying contradictions between digital welfare and sustainable welfare, and the inconsistencies between practices associated with these policy fields, the prospects of applying digital welfare policies to achieve sustainable wellbeing of children, in China and elsewhere, are deemed problematic.

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