Re-framing stupid, stubborn, surreal (3S)
the political stakes for us dealing with 3S in 2024; the story so far with e-scooters
In the opening post in this series, I incautiously risked naming our zeitgeist – as stupid, stubborn, surreal (3S).
3S = 2024, was my claim.
2024 smells stupid, to me, in the same way the sweet scent of Cool Water scented 88–’92, while citro-sweet CK One and the nasal riesling of L’eau d Issey Pour Homme spritzed the spirit of the ‘94–’05, as a musk deer in season sprays against the base of a tree.
We don’t need to look far to get a whiff of the stupid in 2024, or the stubborn, or the surreal. In the presidential debate just gone, for example, an orange bankrupt felon claimed that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there”. I mean – where does one even go with that, as the speech act of a prospective president who has been president? What does it mean to support and glorify in surreal and stubborn stupidity of such Trumpness?
Trump’s low-hanging, long-rolling stupidity does not diminish his power and danger to the world. He could totally win; he might. Remember that Hitler’s Chaplin moustache raised lols in 1932, and that Mussolini always cut a ridiculous figure (the doush in Il Duce), in a way Alexei Sayle could nail. But Trump’s style and figuration of So Fucking Dumb America does fade and crumble his explanatory power as a signature stupid: among his unique awfulness is his uncanny ability to draw and hold such unwarranted attention so easily – even now, even when it’s raining edible cats and dogs. In a sense, Trump is misdirection incarnate: he rumbles us of our better sense about the many more important things percolating badly away in the background. He is both catnip and dogwhistle, taking us away from all those less conspicuous stupids whose stubborn unbeknownst thereness contributes to the cumulative stupid surreality we seem to be stuck in. Don’t feed the trolls.
The kind of stupid I am more interested are the kinds I’ve been blogging about here: the giant dopamine spurt-giving Rube Goldberg Machine powering the goods life into ecological oblivion; the Gorzworld relations between Deliveroo and Deliveree in a servile society that devalues human life and labour in its own pursuit of comfortable nullity.
In urban space, what really bites me on the arse is the style of stupid we saw in 2023 with Wegner’s incoming CDU conservatives in Berlin, trying to ‘make Berlin great again’ by smashing an autobahn through Friedrichshain, and ripping up bike lanes – in a Berlin that seemed to me so moribund, past it, over the shark. That’s stupid enough, but to insist on this dumb kulturkampf while Germany’s whole business model with Russia is in doubt (we give you VW and Miele, you give us fossil fuels to keep the lights on, keep us warm, and keep us able to give you VWs and Miele), while the federal government seems incapable of steering a mature and realistic geopolitics through that in a way that might formalise Germany’s de facto leadership of Europe (put a ringbahn on it0, while bringing an end to Putin’s ruinously stupid, stubborn, surreal armed conflict? In such context, ripping up bike lanes and building autobahns in overpriced post hipster Berlin is a masterstroke of stupefying misdirection.
It’s a style of stupid that ‘says’: don’t look at our (all too humbling) dependence on Russian fossil fuel, look at the REAL problems, those uppity cyclists*. Don’t look at our (all too hypocritical1) dependence on the system of automobility (our short-term diesel-powered prosperity and long-run ecodoom), look at the REAL solution – Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n, auf der Autobahn2. These are not wicked problems, they’re a stubborn insistence in doing something that won’t work and makes no difference (and that will actually make life worse of everyone, including supporter-constituents), in a world in which everything is so acutely at stake. This is my kind of signature stupid, and I’m raising it – like e-scooters, both because it’s a style of happening that’s actually politically very important, yet resists visibility as political3.
For me, e-scooters are precisely this kind of 3S: we think we have e-scooters, but they have us and our cities – and we are being had by the platforms, who, as platforms, take ups most of the space and all the profit, but none of the responsibility.
Riffing back to the previous post on them, what I want to do in this post is really raise the political stakes. There are a few things I was trying to apprehend in the previous post that maybe weren’t in a foreground, and they speak to why e-scooters matter.
First political point from last post: different groups exist, and we live (somehow) in a community of fate – so we need a mature politics that accepts this, but this eludes us
Firstly, for me, if the 2018 Musk-Swisher dialogue I opened with speaks beyond itself, it’s because it points to something in our politics: about individuals-in-groups, our fetishistic affinities, our rivalrous differences, our stupid insistence that such-and-such a preference matters, in reaction to the preferences of a frenemy interlocutor.
In a society comprised of different groups (that is my sociological claim, which is a claim that society is political), there are:
those who clock that scooters lack dignity immediately, and reject them (and seek and find their own kind, often online), then;
those lured by their allure, who ‘ride the appeal they wish to see in the world’ and picture themselves ‘looking fantastic’ atop one (and seek and find their own kind, often online, and also on the street).
Writ large, it has the following deep and consequential meaning – that we tend to avoid.
Different groups exist; and we live (somehow) within, among, and between different groups.
If we could but learn this, and accept and commit to staying with the trouble in a not-always-excellent co-existential reality, a better set of hard-to-solve problems would emerge. I believe this. So there’s my normative political claim.
Adding to this: all of us have plural parts among-between-within pluralities, and play parts in pluralities. Many of our most important groups consist in unchosen bonds (eg family), un-exitable relations (eg Judaism). Outside an exterminist horizon, all groups are ineradicable.
Then also: (m)any of these groups can be good and-or-bad. Valence, behaviour and consequence change radically, depending on the conjuncture. Consider ‘the Germans’4. Nazism didn’t bring out the best in ‘them’ (see footnote), whose progeny later learned to Be differently, in differently composed, differently tensioned groups: kulturkampf over bike lanes and autobahns, however 3S, is infinitely preferable to the eradication of Kulturbolschewismus by the Nazis. In this case, Friedrichshain gets an autobahn, like Shimokitazawa ‘got’ a freeway punched through it (which did kinda wreck what it had in the early 00s, which was amazing). But in that Germany only 8-9 decades ago, a people was nearly exterminated, and Judaism’s precious influence on Germanophone science, art and culture was lost to Germany – a catastrophic loss5.
At scale and in aggregate, what I’m just sketching here has a huge meaning for all of us now. It means our actual-existential ‘world’ is a community of fate, comprised of very many very different (or sometimes too similar, too close) groups with differences. Sometimes our differences are all we have, and so we cling to them so tightly: even the teeny tiny of us from them can be all that matters in the world.
Differences between the different may be confected or real, but they are lived realities for all invested: embodied, substantive, uncomfortable, enduring. The cyclists really do hate the motorists, and vice versa; hopefully they don’t have to kill each other, hopefully they can learn to live together, somehow. So in a sense, we have to reckon with the Musks and the Swishers with whom we share providence, fortune, and doom. This is part of the political stake with e-scooters. Of course, we try not to and prefer not to. L’enferme c’est les autres – so we wear headphones and masks in public; but other people(s), often very fucking irritatingly, are (still) there, and aren’t going away6.
Even in the least dysfunctional and most fortunate of our cities, there are so many different groups: the pluralities are plurally plural. In fact, this is precisely the drawcard of some of the world’s most appealing cities7. But even when difference is working well enough to be gussied up as ‘cosmopolitan diversity’, all these groups (each always-also internally heterogeneous and riven with its own factions) still hew to their own practised understandings of (and lapsed or half-practised commitments to) the good and the just and the valuable. So we share space and fate, but not value commitments. We basically do not agree on what the good life consists in; groups basically disagree about what’s important and who should get what. In a sense, this is what the goods life provides in lieu of this: if everyone is a sovereign consumer and can exercise their ‘democratic choice’ by choosing the dining set that defines them (in their group!) as a person. Outside consumption however, difference endures and rubs up against difference, and this means there will be disagreement and conflict.
In turn, this means we need ways of doing politics, because otherwise – there will be war.
Strangely then, even something as ‘small beer’ as e-scooters and the prospects for the co-existence of Musks and Swishers and the rest of us raises a global demand for a mature politics, and much greater civility and empathy*. Where a mature politics is concerned, Musk’s libertarian kind disavows politics per se as corrupt and impossible, and so tries to solution the city with heroic individualism and digital technology, and by getting online and behaving in an immature way, bagging des autres, the hell of those unlike us (and the internet, in Musk’s image, is mostly just such an immature one up, one down style of bagging and dunking). In a sense, this immature acting out of the disavowal of mature and civil politics has been what the US has made do with for the past decade and more, in lieu of a mutual facing where groups actually encounter one another and really try and listen and try to find unhappy but workable compromises together. As we can see, this has produced grotesque polarisation, and the 3S spectre of people eating cats and dogs in Springfield. This too (heroic individualism, belief in tech, too much time on our phones being immature and mean, collective-terminal polarisation) is ‘a mixed bag of somethings’ our politics now has to reckon with and steer in relation to.
However, my deers: Musks are in our field of vision, Swishers are in our way in traffic. And they love themselves, their lives, and their vehicle choices as much as we do. They think they “look fantastic”. They’re “labouring under an illusion”. We’re living through the pseudoreality that prevails in the 3S undecidability of this; while the world blazes us by.
To labour the section’s politico-ontological point before moving on: so many problems transpire when we pretend different groups do not or should not exist, and/or we act is if they do not and cannot continue to exist. Yet they do.
If we could truly accept the existence of difference and different groups expressing difference (easier said when another group has stolen your land and is still gleefully dominating you), and commit to one another on this basis, much better collective possibilities would strengthen. Huge potential here; as of writing mostly under-realised.
We need to face one another; we need to face that we don’t like one another; we need to keep facing one another, although we do not like one another, although we do not agree.
Second key political point from first e-scooter post: William Gibson Rule applies, global circulation has primacy, and this is true as logistics, commuting, and our getting away from it
In the tough-and-rumble of rough pluralities that do circulate and bump into one another in our majority-urban lives, we need to notice the William Gibson Rule: the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
The future is in the present, and the presents need to be delivered (just ask Santa Claus*).
‘Cos we are living
In a material world
and I
am a material, girl
In this material world (the only one we have), everything and every thing is unevenly distributed.
This means everything and every thing needs to be re-distributed8.
Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go too. For we must all re-distribute ourselves (to[o]), and everything must be re-distributed in relation to everything else, connecting the ‘this and that’ back to us – and everything else. This is the (m)any to (m)any that global circulation is, whether as logistics or commuting – or a quiet weekend escape from logistics and commuting. There’s no escape from circulation in the weltinnenraum of capitalism. The profitable operation of surveillance capitalism, including all e-scooter platforms, depends on knowing and attuning to the William Gibson Rule, in ways that accrue power/knowledge dividends to that platform. This is its point.
But, returning to what I argued for in the last post, in a way that I hope brings the political stakes into focus: as a transport system, the point of e-scooters is that they have no point. They are stupid because they are futile – as a transport system (however Swishers feel about them). This is because, as transport at urban scale, they redistribute almost nothing. E-scooters are logistically insignificant, not only for the rest of us, even for the Swishers who love them9. The platforms take users’ money and personal details, they take up a lot of space, they create a big nuisance: without a significant ‘value add’ as a transport system. They move almost nothing. That is all.
Third political point from last post: the jama nature of the e-scooter comes from its platformisation; personal folding e-scooters are a gadget, but they’re not a jama; the jama is what’s important, because it creates collective action problems
I’d described the jama by way of the Nomura Jellyfish: ‘a living, bell-headed, tentacular paradigm of what thrives when the rest of the system has been diminished and weakened by short sightedness and reckless greed’. A jama is a nuisance, an obstacle, a bother, a disturbance.
But when is a jama not a jama, if it’s an e-scooter?
Here, we have to make clearer a point of differentiation than in the first post, where I kept it down in the footnotes: e-scooters as I am talking about here, the 3S kind that matter politically (thus: to all of us) at urban-political scale, those are the platformised fleet kind. E scooter platforms are jama. In a sense, this shows us how platformisation creates jama-fication, as well as urban-level death loops (Venice) or strangely post-habitable cities (San Fran).
E-scooter platforms are thus distinct entities from their functionally identitical equivalent: personal, folding e-scooters. The latter are still gadgets, but they may be a modestly useful transport boon to individuals with certain transport needs10. But they are not really a transport system ‘solution’ at urban scale (as their boosters have represented).
What folding scooters really remain is just a personal choice and a procilivity, something you might be into or sometimes get up to, that might serve a niche purpose or pleasure – like vaping and Bluetooth-enriched programmable-hackable butt plugs. As such, some people might (not quite) see the point, yet most can live side-by-side with it peaceably, and leave their fanciers alone.
Like rollerblades, folding e-scooters don’t have much political relevance or interest. Notice how they resist contentiousness, how unlikely they are to be the object of a culture war.
So, to return to the key point of this section: it’s the fleet-ness of e-scooters that makes them a jama, and makes them so unlike personal folding e-scooters. Like locust plagues, algal blooms, and Nomura Jellyfish infestations capsizing trawlers, these are fleets that fell to earth. It was the platforms that did this.
The pattern began in 2015 with dockless bike schemes like Ofo and Mobike, and peaked in 2018, when O Bike, which I wrote about, really mucked with the social license that had been in place in the antecedent few years. For good reason; in O Bike’s case at least (see the link to my piece), the whole thing was a big grift.
We can see the jama-ness of the jama that e-scooter platforms are when we glimpse back at dockless. We can visualise it clearly; never forget the ‘unexpected beauty of bicycle graveyards’. Please consider that monumental waste of materials, labour, time, effort, money in this ‘beauty’; please consider the huge ecological cost, and almost nil benefit of this ‘graveyard’. Above all, look at the scale, notice the plague and bloom qualities. This is the jama-ness of the jama. This is what the platforms need to do to make money from their business and operating model.
The fact that personal folding e-scooters will never produce waste of urban scale and global scope, as dockless did, and as the e-scooters will, speaks to what is really in operation behind them – disruption – and who benefits: the platforms, venture capital, surveillance capitalism. For it is only in the confluence of such conditions, particular to post GFC capitalism, and really peaking in the mid 2010s, that we started to see such efflorescences. It’s because the platforms need to ‘make scale at full speed11’ that the jama happens. When this level of industrial pumping out and deployment transpires at contemporary China scale, as Chris has written excellently about, in a series starting here – as happened with dockless – we can see how this sleep of reason has produced disruption-wave surveillance capitalism’s monster piles.
But what’s new, in conclusion? From capitalism delivers the goods to capitalism delivers the buzz, via e-motors and batteries.
However, there was something new and different about e-scooters compared to mid 2010s dockless, and that’s batteries-and-e-motors. This is an interesting final point that shows how technics is never merely technical, and always has potential political valence. Personal folding e-scooters can be small and light: Segway’s models are about 14kg, while one of Inikom’s models is 13.7kg. However, like dockless e-bikes, platformised e-scooters are fully 1/3 heavier (21kg), because they need to be durable enough to withstand deployment in cities, where they get flogged by strangers and ridden hard, day in, night out (see post’s pics as a case in point). At this point, we need to go back to dockless for a final second, and notice how electric motors negate this problem.
As a transport proposition (ie something that ‘beats walking’), ‘the problem’ with mid 2010s dockless was that the bikes were slow, because they were so heavy: as soon as there was a hill or it was hot, you were sweating like crazy. It sucked; they were shitty bikes to ride – cyclists hated them as bicycles12. So then, what e-scooter platforms, like e-bike platforms, have ‘added’ to the debacle of dockless, is what they have removed – effort – and what they have effaced or hidden: mass (meaning: energy use). E-scooters are appealing to Swishers precisely because you don’t have to pedal; it’s effortless. You zoom around on them, you zip around on them, you blast on them, you just stand there like meerkat.
We live in the society of the cheap buzz: like the vibrator and the vape, the electric motor and the battery are taking away the effort you need to get around or get off, by adding in a store of energy borrowed from compressed dead dinosaurs transformed into electricity and stored in the battery cell.
If capitalism delivers the goods, then, in the final analysis, e-scooters deliver the buzz.
~
– but then: what of their persistence, alongside the points raised in that first post, and their relation to disruption, and the buzz they deliver to users?
Surely a big part of it is that they appear as a novel affordance, a cool new way of getting around. In the next post, I will look at e-scooters as an affordance, as a way in to momentum and path dependence, kulturkampf-driven political stupidity, and what we’ll be left with once e-scooters end up piled in ‘beautiful graveyards’.
Insofar as Germans are so proudly Green and so rabidly anti nuclear, unlike those Frenchies.
It’s also interesting that the autobahns were a huge boondoggle and propaganda win for the Nazis during the 30s (look at all these jobs! look at all these freeways!), but as Tooze details in his Wages of Destruction, they didn’t employ that many people and didn’t really get rolled out in the way our retroactive imaginary ‘the Nazis made the trains run on time’ imagines. The Wehrmacht was still using horses for logistics in WWII, and Germany’s rail system was a joke.
Everything related to transport tends to be regarded as being ‘about transport’ and is a technical matter – not least of all by transport scholars, who tend to produce excellent data, but struggle with the context in which transport ‘works’ and makes sense (ie Rome’s roads were about imperium, about power, not just about being culturally good at engineering roadways… )
Which is interesting because: they’re only really ‘a group’ since 1989, and were never a ‘nation’ (like France) in the 19C, and are actually internally riven between north and south, and east and west… and this leaves aside the way that Prussianism totally crushed the Austro-Hungarian way of being Germanophone, and the Jewish way of being Germanophone. ‘The Germans’ are just the residuum left after all of that and the Wold War. There are a plural of Germans. They are the Germansz.
I speak personally: nearly everything that is precious to me in Germanophone philosophy, critical theory, ethics and literature – is Jewish, or was hugely influenced by what this incredibly rich stream of thought and live added to the Germanophone world. As Roth said of the First World War, it was less that we lost the war, and more that we lost the world.
The state of Israel and its military are but the most currently conspicuous example of wounded, traumatised, group-narcissistic collectivities really failing to grapple with this existential reality of the twenty-first century. Let’s please notice the horrendous costs of disavowing different groups sharing space in a community of fate. The stakes, like the collective situation, are existential.
Alongside affluence and global-relative intersectional privilege, diversity really is the measure of appeal. Check the descending list of most liveable (highly questionable! liveable for whom? For upper middle class and rich people…), followed by % foreign born in greater metropolitan area:
1. Vienna, Austria
2. Copenhagen, Denmark
3. Zurich, Switzerland
4. Melbourne, Australia
5. Calgary, Canada (tied with Geneva)
5. Geneva, Switzerland (tie)
7. Sydney, Australia (tied with Vancouver)
7. Vancouver, Canada (tie)
9. Osaka, Japan (tied with Auckland)
9. Auckland, New Zealand (tie)
• New York City, United States (5,656,000)
• Los Angeles, United States (4,421,000)
• London, United Kingdom (4,051,502)
• Toronto, Canada (2,870,000)
• Hong Kong (2,793,450)
• San Francisco, United States (2,634,270)
• Paris, France (2,429,223)
• Sydney, Australia (2,072,872)
• Miami, United States (1,949,629)
• Melbourne, Australia (1,801,139)
The contrary would be the cosmic impossibility contained in this amazing album title: In A Flash Everything Comes Together As One There Is No Need For A Subject「またたくまに すべてが ひとつに なる だから 主語は いらない」
The rejoinder would be: but they’re micromobility! The rejoinder to the rejoinder: they negate active transport that already exists, and, as gadgets, they’re not accessible, and compared to other uses of e motors and batteries (like e bikes and electric scooters), the design choice has inherently less transport potential.
Say you’re a shift worker and you need to get home when the trains are down, or say you work in the city but live in the outer suburbs or regions, and it’s a 7km walk when you get off the train… then it makes very good sense to turn that >1 hour walk in to a 20 minute scoot.
And really: global monopoly scale in several years no? This was Uber’s single-minded pursuit.
In fact, what was curious about them was that cyclists abhorred and avoided them; they were bicycles for people who don’t like bicycles, don’t have bicycles, don’t commute on bicycles. And if you rode them, they were kind of an anti bicycle. But as Lance reminded us: it’s not about the bike.