from 'having' e-scooters in 2024 to the elusiveness of empathy, and being had by the platforms
stupid, stubborn, surreal (2024 = 3S): cul-de-sac and ausgang (way out) in/of these impasses of urban communities of fate
This post is the completed omnibus/guide of this earlier post. To that extent, it’s a paste in of that earlier post, with a few spontaneous edits, plus the added two I did to complete the series.
If you want the way back and through, here’s the posts in order.
1)
intimations and apprehensions of the 2024 zeitgeist, part one
This tried to name the scent of the age, and say why it’s worth risking naming it.
This is a post about zeitgeist: re-reading Musil’s Man without Qualities, and re-reading Infinite Jest, I see how important this is to me, and how hard it is to nail, and how amazing it is when someone of those kinds of talents manages to nail it.
2)
stupid, stubborn, surreal (2024)
This post tried to say why and how e-scooters offer a signature stupid in the urban politics of our global cities.
3)
Blurred Lines: the emergence of Uber and disruption
a paradigm-setting case that provided key enabling conditions for the stupidity of e-scooters
This long read, slightly more ‘written’ (as it was a never used section from a chapter of a book never yet written), was looking at Uber as paradigm of disruption. This is doubly important, as Uber (alongside G Maps) was paradigm setting, and as Uber owns Lime now. Uber is e-scooters now; this means e-scooters are Uber now. Uber’s story is among the most telling of the 2010s, but in a sense it’s still under-known, or resists knowing, although we ‘know’ it.
I’ll be providing an audio version of this in the coming week or two; going to experiment with this and see how it feels and if I want to commit to doing it routinely.
4)
Re-framing stupid, stubborn, surreal (3S)
the political stakes for us dealing with 3S in 2024; the story so far with e-scooters
This post attempted to integrate some of the points raised in a rush in the first few, and ‘pull the focus ring’ to enable the politics of this to come into focus. The key idea is that transport is never about transport, and that e-scooters aren’t just about futile gadgets that lack dignity – they’re about us our struggles to collude or collaborate with things we’re already colliding and in conflict with us. In a community of fate, interacting with difference means that all kinds of unchosen intercourse are foisted upon us; it would be better if we encountered and faced this.
5)
E-scooters between shitty there-ness, technical affordance, social acceleration
a final set of hinges bringing us to where we can reflect on an elusive mature politics
Here, I looked at the base phenomenology of ‘the things themselves’, and what tends to happen when 邪魔 (jama) -ish fleets of them are foisted on this. I also tried to look at the technical aspects of what was purportedly new and good about these things, and argued that it’s a stupid and reckless use of a set of really amazing material and technical innovations, converged as an object, which, as a deployed design choice, ramifies for us as it becomes a path-dependent choice with its own momentum (like internal combustion engines). I then added social reflection as a way of partially explaining why e-scooters might – still? – seem like a good idea, or might reflect a society incapable on reaching that reflection, because it was too busy tailgating at life.
6)
In this post, I tried to ‘pursue’ the pursuit of this imbroglio, all the way to its tragicomic terminus. What I really noticed is how wilfully infantile it all is – and this is something different to the stage-appropriate immaturity of the infant. In other words, what’s hidden in the facts and fatalities of 3S is will and volition: we ‘keep it foolish’, and we will our own regression, for a number of complex reasons, because of a number of complexes. If Freud was correct to say that one subdues the defences by honouring them (a lovely idea), what would it mean to honour our need to regress and defend in the face of our lives, in the midst of other people in these urban communities of fate, in ways that weren’t, you know, basically selfish and at other people’s expense? Could we enjoy the childlike joy of playing with gadgets – but with one another, rather than not at one another’s expense? Is there a way to be childlike and playful, rather than childish and reactive? Why are we choosing to keep it foolish and allowing surveillance capitalism to provide the toys of this wilful stupidity?
7)
In noticing the excrescence of my own construction here, I tried to step away from its own involuting teetering-ness, and dismount with what I feel is a partial, simple, antidote to this 3S ~dote: empathy. I’ve had to not just think but also really feel my way through empathy; it’s slow and subtle and it requires not just the ‘vicarious introspection’ that Kohut intimated, but also really noticing slowly inside what we’re yearning for: to be seen and noticed – above all, to be noticed in a loving, or friendly, amicable way – by the people around us. We can see the flip of this in fiendish empathy (interesting that Kohut was a Germanophone person, and that the ‘fiend’ is the enemy (Schmitt’s concept of the political as the ‘friend enemy distinction’ is between Freund & Feind). But beyond emnity, we can see indifference – or: indifference cannot see ‘us’, does not notice us, does not care. The broadest point, which sits alongside Zuboff’s reflective synthesis, is that surveillance capitalism, the platforms, the titans, they do not see because they do not care: they just want their data and their profit from your attention. To that extent, e-scooters in the city are about us wilfully regressing, in exchange for allowing the platforms (to pay off councils by the unit) to disperse Empathy Annulment Units in urban space, for our joy or jama, for their profit. Their corporate accumulation is our collective empathic dispossession. This is the fundamental stake here. We feel we’ve had e-scooters in our cities; but we’ve been had – by the platforms.
With Keyzer Soze and Baudrillard: the greatest trick the gadget ever pulled was convincing us that it’s a mode of transport.
Thank you if you’re still reading. This has been interesting for me, I sincerely hope it’s been of value to you.
Next up is anger and violence, then a return to guilt and sadness… then December I’ll go back to Gorz and containerisation to think about Santa Claus in the era of planetary boundary breach. Santa comes from the North Pole: will our chimneys have turned it into a lake?