"Keep it foolish!": from the doom loops of the goods life to the structuration of wilfully infantile and reactive politics of e-scooter platforms
"Keep it foolish!": from the doom loops of the goods life to the structuration of wilfully infantile and reactive politics of e-scooter platforms
a polemic against the prevalent choice of "a fundamentally passive and infantile" relationship to people and space in our urban communities of fate
doom loops of the goods life in our urban communities of fate
We find ourselves living (somehow) in a community of fate; perhaps a doom collective of dividuals in a control society; perhaps a foaming co-ommunity of couples alone together in their apartment bubbles, incapable of realising themselves through one another in – full circle – a community of fate. We roll in strange circles; these are surreally loopy times.
Welcome to the winter of our sad ouroboros.
The imperative to circulate moves all, yet we are implacably stuck in this bumbling, bubbling loop, with no doom to move out. M People is over.
Is doom not spur enough to move out of this cul-de-sac?
I’m puzzled that it seems so now.
Social acceleration does what it does (it accelerates); change is out of control
– yet things stay surreally stubbornly stuck on stupid.
How did this impasse come to pass?
For at least half of us, the bare majority, rising, ours is the possible doom loop of an urban community of fate. We have to live, somehow, in among large conglomerations of strangers, in conurbations of strained propinquity: this is the innenwelt or weltinnenraum of/for most of us, to which there is no viable outside.
We could go back to our villages; but most of us don’t (want to). We yearn for a thing we don’t really want, yet remain in places we no longer like or love, existentially homeless yet precariously enmeshed in gainful employment, hustlin’ on Only Fans to afford that harbour view apartment, slinging weight as a ‘sensual riposte to labour’.
Why? We need to consider the pull of the pull factors here for a moment.
As Rosa perceptively notices, the pull of access, the desire to bring ‘the whole world’ within manipulable reach, pulls us toward our cities. This is such a strong pull, for so many. Even the most liveable cities are are no longer as liveable or as attractive, and certainly not as affordable as they were – within living memory – but they remain powerful attractors, for perhaps two thirds of millions now living.
Alongside our enmeshment in tech and our dependency on fossil fuels, this is the global social fact of our community of fate. We keep moving to cities, and cities keep getting bigger, and big cities keep pulling moar into their maw.
Most of the time, for most of us billions of millions, this sub/urban innenwelt is the attractor of the ‘goods life’. First we are pulled in by our relentless quest to bring more of the world within reach, then we try to pull more and more objects toward our maw selves, with the global logistics of one-click consumerism gladly obliging the double click of the Apple Pay wanty.
Global logistics delivers the goods – by honouring the collective orality of a species who has to keep gobbing things to survive, and who wants bubble tea so very much.
Global logistics delivers the goods – by bringing the wanty wants within reach (of many of us), aligning our subjective circuits of desiring wanty with their objective circuits of control and surveillant profit.
Our lives in their portfolios; their products in our mouths. Capitalism is something we end up mouthing as it delivers the goods.
Now, with the primacy of electronically controlled, battery powered electric motors – in our vape pens, our vibrating devices, our e-scooters, our RVs – capitalism delivers the buzz as it delivers the goods. And we insist that it continue to do so. We get very sad and very angry when it breaks.
Delivering the buzz contains us through consumption.
Delivering the goods contains us – but without contenting us, without cradling us, without holding us. The shipping container is no holding environment, but it conveys something comforting. Give us this day our daily milk coffee, and we’ll drink it from a sippy cup.
At street scale, Deliveroos buzz around, delivering our tacos, our chicken fried rice. Deliverees gratify orality by buzzing the Deliveroo in, so they can receive the goods of the goods life: unto their mouths, via their doorstep, via plastic containers – none of which are truly recyclable. Gotta get those endocrine-disrupting chemicals in me. ‘Shut up and take my money’.
At planetary scale, the itty bitty shit bits accumulate as the flotsam and jetsam of the goods life; look in your local creek and you’ll see this joy exhaust floating and sinking and steeping in. In Melbourne, I notice right now how Lime helmets pop up on poles and hide in corners, never again to give someone’s head a skull-sized container.
The goods life of urban communities of fate such as ours is fateful, it might be doomed, even if we take our protein pills and put our helmets on. It can’t go on like this; it goes on and on – like this. It’s all billions of us have known; it’s what many of us have; it’s what other billions are flooding into, fleeing the countryside and its fields and peasant ancestors, pulled in by the strains of life on the land, and the lure of the goods life. ‘Here came everybody’. The city was our doom receptacle. Its where our helmets ended up, after we ended up where we ended up – because of the lure of the goods life.
Logistics carries a political meaning, but it contains this politics within itself.
The lure of the goods life we all try to live well enough with means we’re dealing with the rough urban pluralities that each of us already are (cue the Whitman quote, the Deleuze and Guattari quote). The goods life stands in lieu of an avowed, practised politics by trying to provision us in a sociotechnical ‘way’ that is a ‘personal matter’ between desire and distribution – but secretes a whole global politics about its ‘person’. This bag has a false bottom in it, and its name is politics. Logistics is a political meaning, but it contains its politics within itself: as it milks us, it secretes this secret secretion like milk. Its politics is a let down, its politics leaks out.
This is where I am pointing these reflections, like an arrow at a nipple, based on the many points I’ve raised: in this round of posts, by looking at the imbroglio of e-scooter platforms in Melbourne. But more broadly, this is one of the sustained points of this blog.
Coda-refrain: Logistics carries a political meaning, but it contains this politics within itself.
Rough plurality blasting past us in a cloud of vapour, on a scooter, ‘inside’ noise-cancelling headphones: Arendt’s “irritability of everybody against everybody” is what difference truly means in our cities now. Living with difference is not the mushy joy of diversity (see below), it is the hard work of living with people who are really different, who do not share our needs, wants, interests and values. Some groups are a nuisance; some are against us; some try to bomb us when they page us. As polycritical stressors ramp up, the itches become sores and welts. 21C difference is thus very much not the well-lit Kodacolor diversity of this iconic Toscani-era Benetton advertisement.
Nor is it the gayly glad ‘here comes everybody!’ of Clay Shirky’s early Obama/’08 era of tech-positive boosterism, a missive from a time when a lol still denoted laughter and amusement, or even love, as per this joke.
The difference that makes the difference with difference in our urban lives now is ambivalent: not all good, not all bad, not all anything, and very very many things at once, ‘extremely loud and incredibly close’, yes, but not in a 00s Foer-y way, in a 2020s smartphone-cum-stupidblaster way, as Chris and I discussed in our most recent episode.
Difference is sought after and it is aversive: we manically seek and feel visercally averse to the global mass tourist ‘experiences’ we still fly long haul for, although ‘we know very well’ our partipation in this is transforming cultural jewels like Venice and Kyoto into almost unliveable hellscapes of Google 4.7 rating ramen shop queues, selfie sticks, and The Most Photographed Barn in America. We move from Appadurai’s global cultural economy of ‘disjuncture and difference’, the tension of heterogeneity and homogeneity, to difference as disjunctive. We live in anti EM Foster fragments: only dys-connect.
In such a context of dissonant difference, plural pluralities are blastingly rough. They blast past. They blast past and fail to notice. We fail to clock one another. We don’t care, we don’t notice, we don’t see one another. We blast past one another on scooters, blasting video on our StupidBlasters. The absence of notice in all this raises a fundamental problem for us, I think – one so important I’ll make it the focus for the final post of this series. But to stay with this post’s purpose of pointing to the elusiveness and need for a mature politics – well, what of it? For me, it sits in the tension of the need for maturation (a never ending internal need we have to differentiate), the strains we endure, and the lure of infantilisation, the way capitalism seductively offers us every possible opportunity to regress and wallow.
A mature politics the elusive obvious of urban life right now1.
By ‘mature politics’ I do mean to draw attention to the immaturity of what passes for political action in the 3S zeitgeist. It is immature because it is infantile, reactive, dysregulated, self-involved, and dominated by the most archaic defence mechanisms. It really is. It is full of rage and envy, it is paranoid-schizoid, it involves the costly indulgence of denial, repression, projection, displacement, regression sublimation, rationalization, reaction formation, introjection, and identification with the aggressor. With Neil Postman and David Foster Wallace, I have formed the view that the goods life has engendered a world (in the fortunate places) in which Aldous Huxley’s pleasure principle dystopia has won2. As Wallace said three decades ago:
I know that in certain moods, when I’m tired or when I’m in some sort pain, I want kind of infantile pleasures. I wanna sit and receive pleasure without give anything or do anything… (the radio interviewer reflects on her addiction to Tetris). This stuff seems to me a bit like candy. I mean, candy’s alright, a couple of pieces of candy a day; when it becomes your diet, you get sick really fast. Part of our problem seems to be I think…. first of all that the candy is getting better and better and better. And second of all that I think somehow we as a culture have stopped – or are afraid – to teach ourselves that pleasure is dangerous, and that some kinds of pleasure are better and others, and that part of being a human being means deciding how much active participation we want to have in our own lives. I’m not trying to make it sound like I’m anti TV or anti entertainment, I just think that it’s a really exciting opportunity to decide whether our relationship to the world is going to be fundamentally passive and infantile, or one that’s active and hard and takes more work”.
(link here if you’re on Spotify, I need to find out the proper title of this one).
Wallace here is correct in his diagnosis, but very wrong and very American to route everything back to individual choice and internal work. This needs to happen too, but we also very badly need a politics, because we need to be together, because we are still together in this community of fate, even when we’re so (badly) different. So we need a politics to get is through this, and ‘it had better’ be mature.
By elusive and necessary mature politics, I don’t mean anything as high-minded, painstakingly explicated and normatively final as Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness, or Xi Xinping Thought. Nor do I mean anything as ‘well intentioned’ and radically transformational as what arises from Bookchin’s social ecology, the Secondary Boddhisatva Vows, or Buber’s Paths in Utopia (which: check ‘em out). Minimally, the mature politics eluding us would be about cultivating helpful ways with one another. Given that we have our way with one another, we need more skilful means for being with, among, and against one another.
This has to start with noticing one another (again: the focus of the next post).
Please start noticing people care-fully. What if you begin today with the people around you, or return home noticingly among them.
Please notice on the train
the ways in which everyone tries so hard
not to notice anyone or anything.
Please try practising noticing your fellow denizens not noticing one another ‘so hard’. It’s hard work, being among the wilfully indifferent. Even this starting noticing is hard to do, a hard trouble to stay with, for it too quickly produces so many irritations. Note to self re: social fact: If you want to see any obstacles to political change, try changing something, and notice how reality pushes back.
A mature politics would be about dealing well enough with what the Buddhists might entitle, then listicle as ‘The Foreseeable Inevitabilities’:
potentially escalatory conflict
territorial incursion,
substantive disagreements of value and resources
incompatible expressions of the good and just
bad trance music on Bluetooth speakers
At the very least, a mature urban politics dealing with the Inevitabilities would need to be robust and viable enough so that we can nut a way back to a modus vivendi without making things making things worse (MAWA3 politics?), getting more polarised, or devolving into armed conflict and exterminism. A mature politics might not be televised; it would definitely not explode when you picked it up to receive an encrypted message. A mature politics says only: if God is dead and we’re the proximate adults, if we and this here rignt how is all we have (left), then we have a choice to begin addressing serious problems, knowing there is no one else but the co-commuters around us in traffic this morning.
How then should we then deal maturely with one another, and our selves?
I’m not sure; I want to keep working on this. Normative political theory is one of the hardest things to build; just try and see how far you get.
But (coda-refrain) I do observe that a mature politics eludes us at present; it is unlikely. It is precious, needful, and scarce.
A mature politics, so needful and so elusive.
This too is another 3S aspect of our community of fate: how absent are the agentic ways and means for getting us out of the shit we’re in. Verily. We don’t typically seem to be able to take care of one another as we disagree (and we do!); we don’t seem to be able to take care of ourselves – as we contend with our deeply felt feelings and values (and we don’t).
In reflecting on the emerging, unfolding imbroglio around e-scooter platforms in Melbourne4 as a signature stupid of this 2024 = 3S zeitgeist, we would even say that the politics of e-scooter platforms is as conspicuously stupid and stubborn as it is surreal; it is a very immature politics, one instance of conspicuous others I’ve mentioned, but that shows us the sorry absence of skilful means at urban scale.
Instead, what I think we have is full blown, stage four 3S…. I conclude by looping into it as follows.
the structuration of wilfully infantile and reactive politics of e-scooter platforms
Why is the e-scooter debate so immature, then, and what might be a key that would turn the lock, a phone that would unlock the ‘chuck your toys’ aspects of the confected scooter platform ‘war’ Melbourne may be about to have?
In the manner of ‘fun, fun fun – til your daddy takes your T-Bird away’, E-scooter politics involves a rivalrous grabbing at toys; it enacts Girard’s mimetic desire5 which, as a generalisation of the solipsistic wanty world of the toddler, appeals to unevenly mature people, like tech bro overlords, and their alt lite re-posters. Like the Neurotribes argument, e-scooters, and its reactive politics, is attractor catnip for the dog whistlers. Turds of a feather, as Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris might have punned it in Nathan Barley (see below).
At present in Melbourne’s CBD, which, like Paris, is having a reprieve from e-scooters, the removal of e-scooters has involved the taking away of ‘those toys of ours’, the gadgets, followed by the reactive insistence they should be returned – so that people can play on them once more.
This is a whole infantile drama, rationalised – by its boosters – as making the city better by making it more connected: as if e-scooter platforms solve transport problems or are even about transport. As if. See back to my posts on this.
So also: e-scooters structurate immaturity, they bake in the infantile. Its as if we wish to cake on the mud we’ve been wallowing in. We love it, we want to wear it, we don’t lack dignity, we look fantastic.
We’ve let the platforms lure us into the magical thinking that the scooters are about transport, and that the platforms are for better transport and for people and for cities. Yet we know very well: the platforms are for surveillance capitalism, and surveillance capitalism is for data and profit. But do we know that, although we know that? IT’s true though: in the same way that Lee Marvin’s Walker in Point Blank pitilessly ‘just wanted his money’, the platforms just want their prongs in, so they can get their money and their/your data. They don’t care. This blankness is something we know very well… and yet….
The imbroglio around e-scooters also tends to trap us into a boring circuit where this immature reactivity just rolls round and round. This is the kind of sad circularity that makes and keeps things 3S. These kinds of recursion-ruled circuits are explored powerfully by Vogl by way of ressentiment. They produce-and-reproduce-and-entrench a prevailing pseudoreality by insisting on their own differences and distinctions. Recursions impose their value set over those of other groups, recruiting lots of different allies, insisting themselves on space which, as contested, involves many different walks of life in many different ways of walking through the city. E-scooters are a way of occupying the city and moving through it in a domineeringly infantile way that, like urban jet skis, asserts a kind of joy exhaust it asks users to stay heedless of as it sprays and spreads it all over everyone else. Someone cleans up the mess, you just enjoy the ride. Let the good times roll.
Like all culture war discourse that is now prevalent online, it also involves enactments of the most archaic defence mechanisms6, which I intimated above: people claim it isn’t a problem, they trivialise or push away the problems as if they’re not real, they claim that ‘the problem’ is the people who oppose them, they put the problem on the ‘bad apples’ (the Dinkers riding them helmetless on a Friday night), they regress to the state of Swishers who pup themselves by asserting, in reaction, that they look amazing and feel fantastic just riding one, the transport equivalent of KFC’s tag line (again!): ‘shut up and take my money’.
As a perfectly 3S urban jet ski, as a low profile Segway that can camouflage itself as a mode of urban transport, as a jama par excellence that makes its jama-ness other people’s problem, the e-scooter is the expression of the freedom to blast un2 that joy fantastic, to be the ‘whee!’ you wish to see in the world7, to be recklessly, manically dysregulated, heedless of the joy exhaust generated for others by our personal pursuit of a hedonic wanty: what? It’s legal?! Notice here: someone else comes and cleans up after us, takes care of the joy toy, disappearing the waste and damage it produces.
Finally, the imbroglio around e-scooter platforms traps us in immaturity because it lures groups of proximate adults into a subjectivity in which defends its entrenched regression as a right: the right to consciously choose to be wilfully regressed and let everyone around you burn, in the name of ‘the individual’, with his credit card and phone and visa status, to blast around as they see fit. The actual adults – the blurred lines disruptor corporation, Uber play helicopter parents of their fleet and their pup riders, lovelessly parenting the whole shebang, monitoring phone-and-rider-in-motion for their own profitable benefit, paying off councils by the unit for the right to continue operating at everyone else’s expense.
In sum, indulging e-scooter platforms involves us in taking a political position of choosing-to-refuse to do what ideal-typical adults (ought to) do, which I’ll look at again in the next and final post of this series:
employ reason and accountability,
take responsibility for (un)forseen consequences,
see beyond instant gratification and myopic self-interest,
consider scale and collective ramification, and
act in such a way that we steward a better city for who are dependent and voiceless8.
Indulging e-scooter platforms in 2024 means tarrying in this stupidity – in costly ways – as the world burns. It’s not just e-scooters in the streets, or even e-scooters in mid 2010s disruption eraa, it’s e-scooters in the era of Ukraine and Gaza and Beirut. This horizon, which we’re so much closer to now, was already visually very clear to Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris in 2005, way back in stencils and Myspace Shoreditch, when they shot this scene of Nathan Barley.
As a visual punctuation mark, to me it intuits how micromobility and phone always carried within them aspects of this 3S futile jama lacking in dignity, one that mostly-durably appeals, for reasons I’ve tried to sketch out, to a certain kind of childless 25-35 year old service economy worker, majority male, who work close to networked computing, love tech, and follow the trends of their milieu.
It is precisely what is being all-the-more destroyed in Beirut right now, after the immature, reactive (Hulk smash, blind rage thymotic, acting out) pulverisation of Gaza, in the name of saving a people from a holocaust.
the urban fortunate live in Brave New World, the urban unfortunate live in JG Ballard’s High Rise, the devastated live in Octavia Butler’s Wanting Seed.
For sure there are lots of people who are Ultra MAWA, as soon as I come to think about it. Ripping up bike lanes in the name of cars-and-freeways is banal Ultra MAWA, for example.
As I’ll write of later: there’s a hiatus now as there are local council elections across the state, including for the Melbourne Mayoral race (where e-scooters were, improbably, successfully banned from the CBD by the current-incumbent mayor, who’s only been in a short while).
NB, this is why the children-focused Nintendo is called the Wii (as well as cos ‘we’ go whee! together). Where we go wii we go wii together?
Ie: those excluded from the decision-making because too old, too young, not human (enough), not citizen enough, or not yet born, who will bear the brunt of the downstream costs of letting people keep fucking around atop gadgets and so fuck us all around in this way.