stupid, stubborn, surreal (2024)
the case of e-scooters, part one: a stupid, futile gadget that lacks dignity, and a big jama (邪魔) of contemporary urban space
Hello all,
In thinking through the stupid, stubborn, surreality (3S) of 2024, there are many examples that one could use: Ukraine and Gaza, Trump and Vance, Olympic Breakdancing and Opening Ceremony Transpanics, etc etc etc.
I’ve chosen e scooters…
…because I think their prevalent uses in urban space now are so conspicuously stupid, and because their stubborn and surreal persistence in most rich cities in the face of this – and with no compelling counterarguments (why have them, actually?) – gives us good and clear senses of the kinds of imbroglios and collective action problems I think are at the heart of our (majority urban) present: the ‘solutions’ presented, the problems that get ‘solved’, where attention tends to not/go as a result, and the mess and muddle this usually leaves us with.
Initially, my best laid plan was to nail the 3S of e scooters in one three thousand word post; lol. As usual, my paragraphs started calving. In this case, I don’t just attribute this to the prolix tendencies of the pre-edited spontaneous blog-oriented writing style I consciously practise here (also-always in play). It’s that I really do think there’s a lot I can say about e scooters; yes, as a frustrated one-time transport scholar who’s written a bit about surreal objects in 2010s urban space. But more than this: as a social theorist for whom transport – which is never (only) about transport – is dialectical enough for critical theory1, insofar as it animates the fundamental contradictions of the societies in which we actually live. Nuff said; let’s begin with the stupid stupidity of the e-scooter in 2024.
~
The drama of e scooters was staged and skewered perfectly in 20182, when Elon Musk and Kara Swisher (still on speaking terms) concluded their conversation as follows:
Musk: Thank you, Kara. It was great to see you.
Swisher: It’s been a really fascinating discussion, and I will think about buying an electric car, probably not.
Musk: I mean, why not?
Swisher: Make a scooter. Make a scooter and I’ll go for it. They actually are electric, what am I talking about?
Musk: I don’t know, there was some people in the studio who wanted to make a scooter, but I was like, “Uh, no.”
Swisher: I love the scooter, no, get on the scooter.
Musk: It lacks dignity.
Swisher: No, it doesn’t lack dignity.
Musk: Yes, they do.
Swisher: They don’t lack dignity, what are you talking about?
Musk: Have you tried driving one of those things? They —
Swisher: Yes, I do it all the time, I look fantastic.
Musk: They do not, you are laboring under an illusion.
Swisher: All right, well, everybody at Lime, don’t worry, Elon Musk is not coming for you.
Musk: Electric bike. I think we might do an electric bike, yeah.
Swisher: All right, perhaps. All right, Elon Musk, thank you very much. I appreciate it.
Musk: That was a pleasure, thank you. It was good to see you.
In a sense – and as with the last post – maybe we can just glance above and then end it (all) here? As they say in Berlin at the tram’s terminal point: diese fahrt endet hier.
Yet 2018 Musk was correct; 2018 Swisher was-is laboring under an illusion. The rider does not look fantastic; they do lack dignity.
Yet, like Swisher, and her ‘personal brand’ sunglasses, e scooters persist as a purported transport system ‘solution’. This is stupid.
In the following posts, I want to show how the persistence of e scooters is a plumply juicy stupid, a ripe example of 3S stupidity in action, as societal process, deployed over time, at urban, scale across nearly everywhere – except Paris (in September 2023), and now Melbourne’s CBD (August 2024 – we’ll get back to this news-to-hand in the third post).
That individual e-scooters persist although they lack dignity maybe just speaks to the presence of a counter-cohort, their riders3: those Swisher-like human entities –mostly young men – with whom we share urban space, and who are so very drawn to them (of whom, more soon). Like ‘mermaids, and the sailors who fancy them’, e scooters are a lure– for that group of people4.
Yet, as a transport system5 (and this is my concern here, stupidity at urban scale, stupidity in not/dealing with serious issues we have in living together), it is also conspicuously a supposed transport system that has no allure for the Muskily unconvinced among us (when you are in urban space next time, notice a standing reserve of e scooters, and notice how many people around you are not riding them). And as I’ll now explore, it’s also an ‘unconvincing stupid’, with very little ultimate transport potential: both inherently, and for most bodies.
the stupidity of the stupid: e-scooters as futile, for us, and for those who like them
This points to the deeper problem with e scooters as a purported transport system deployed in dense urban areas. They are stupid because they are futile – for the following reasons.
E-scooters are futile for the vast majority of people – who do not ride them (see above). They are also futile for the substantial minority of people (<16, >65) who are unable to – legally, or safely – access and ride them when they’re afforded by surveillance capitalist platforms like Lime and Neuron. So, just on first glance, they are futile as a transport system, simply because (unlike ordinary public transport modes) they exclude many of the forseeable-ordinary kinds of bodies. As an individual choice, they might be a hoot. As a transport system, they are not public; and cities consist of bustling sets of jostling publics. This is a private hoot gimmick pretending to be a transport system – futile.
And yet…. as an urban transport system they are even futile for the Swishers in our midst who like to burn book and tool around in aviators atop a vehicle whose meerkat-like standing position gives people the “P.B.E. (Paul Blart Effect): you look like a blissed-out dork” – for these two teasons.
Firstly, they are even futile for the Swishers because they tend to replace cycling and walking in dense urban areas: they replace modes of active transport, modes we already had. This takes place in a context where people in Anglocapitalist countries take roughly half the steps they might do to stay healthy, and where inactivity creates a huge burden of physical and mental health issues at population level, and as we age. This is fine for Nick Kyrgios (pic above), but for most of us – we should walk more, or ride a bike. Why don’t we?
People who fail to/prefer not to/won’t/are hesitant to cycle usually are so because of safety fears (a finding which is highly gendered6), The research tends to show this occurs because there are so so many cars (fierce bad traffic + problem of induced demand), and because, especially in certain cultures, driver behaviour is dangerously inattentive, not other regarding (selfish, indifferent) and often also so hostile (also a gendered, culturally patterned social fact).
Bodies who ‘could walk but don’t’ often do/not do so because a multigenerational legacy of 20C planning decisions has undermined urban walkability. Basically, postwar, traffic engineers took control and engineered cities for the circulation of car traffic, without imagining the problem of induced demand that would eventually create, alongside gridlock as the global social fact of 21C urban automobility [again, partly: problem of induced demand]). In other words, where good urban planning can make it safe to ride and pleasant to walk (and this is a planning possibility, but harder once you have shitty facts on the ground), a significant percentage of people tend to do so – and there are strong systems-level and population health-level benefits to encouraging this, for everyone. E scooters add nothing here: they replicate existing options more inclusive of the full range of human bodies, while creating worse health outcomes.
So then: e-scooters are futile, redundant and non-inclusive. ‘Bit of a knob’ individuals like Kyrgios might like to blast around on them with his GF, but in urban contexts (see note below), as a transport ‘offer’, they basically make things worse for all of us, without solving the problem of problems: gridlock.
At the scale of a ‘journey’, e scooters are also futile because they’re an ‘answer’ to a question no one was asking, a question begged from the non-problem of the ‘final mile’7.
The ‘final mile problem’: the ‘issue’ with walking 1.6km.
An able-bodied adult (ie, a person capable of hiring and riding an e scooter) can walk ‘a mile’ in 15 minutes. The selfsame bodied person, taking a scooter, makes the same trip… in 5-8 minutes. This means scooters ‘solve’ – salve? – their stated problem by ‘giving back’ several minutes, at the cost of 2,000 steps (when, in line with the above, most of us need to double the steps we take to avoid early ill-health and decrepitude).
As a possible individual-biographical solution to a botched date or job interview, let’s grant that this has potential bacon saving power, especially if you arrive on time and not sweaty. There are rare moments in the life of an individual when it might matter (if it was there and you knew it was there and found one where you wanted it and could unlock and pay for it, &c &c). But as urban transport on the level of a transport system, ‘saving’ seven minutes through this use of scarce, precious, ecologically sensitive resources – electric motors, rare earth minerals, electricity, contested urban space – where walking was possible, and where existing transport alternatives could also have saved that time, is a futile answer to a non-problem, a difference that makes no difference, and thus very futile, very stupid – and lacking dignity.
Ten hours of ‘Chimpanzee Riding on a Segway’: a singularly emotionally honest work of art examining the deepest truths of the Segway, and dignity and futility, in the way only J TV can
pure gratuitousness, pure waste: e-scooter as gadget
E scooters are also even more stupid than this, because they are gadgets. In the world of transport planning, a rough rule of 8-80 applies. In short, 8–80 means that, if an eight or eighty year old person can’t use it, or it causes mischief, especially for those vulnerable groups of people, then it is a gadget, and probably never a wise choice to allow as an urban transport system.
In the world of Baudrillard, the gadget carries the halo of the functional simulacrum. In English, this means that the gadget is ‘a something’ that appears-to-be-useful. This adds a helpful way of thinking about the gadget-ness of e scooters, because they have managed to appear-to-be an urban transport option, and have been made to appear thus by the platform owners and their boosters (like 2018 Swisher) (in the next post I’ll explore how disruption contributed to making this seem more plausible).
The e-scooter entered our cities passing itself off as transport (camouflaging its futility), while actually, as a gadget, it is
“pure gratuitousness under a cover of functionality, pure waste under cover of an ethic of of practicality” (Baudrillard, ‘Sign Function and Class Logic’, 6/32).
This makes the e scooter a futile and indolent gadget that also has had a pseudo-magical ability of upholding the pretence of its own transport-value, giving the Swishers and Nicks in our midst strange, futile, dangerous joy rides they didn’t need, while providing almost nothing but nuisance, obstacle, and ramping costs at the societal and collective level.
The following post will switch to consider this question: granted this is might be the case, why does such stupidity persist? But before getting to this, and in conclusion, how might we ultimately think of this ‘big stupid’, this gros betise (big boo boo?) of post GFC, post disruption urban spaces?
邪魔: e-scooter as jama
For me, the ‘triumph’ of the e scooter – a ‘triumph’ similar to that of Musk’s Baphomet costume or Swisher’s sunglasses – reminds me of nothing so much has the Nomura jellyfish. In this not amazing but informative documentary, I was astonished by the way the Nomura manage to thrive in contemporary ocean environments – precisely because the ocean ecologies between the estuaries in China’s coastal cities and the Japan Sea Coast have been so degraded by urbanisation and over fishing. The Nomura is 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: they are so big and heavy they capsize fishing trawlers, and the Japanese government continues to struggle to find ways of processing or eating them. As of writing, they are thriving, and no one quite knows what to do.
The bothersome uselessness of the Nomura that have led Japanese fisherfolk to call it a ‘jama’邪魔 : a word that carries all the connotations we need to give a final critical counterpane on the e scooter. Jama means hindrance, obstacle, nuisance, bother, disturbance. A jama can be a person knocking on your door ‘am I bothering/ disturbing you?’ A jama can be something jamming up the works; some jamas can capsize your fishing trawler; a jama could clutter up urban footpaths and provide insanely dangerous transport to a tiny minority of able-bodied people – mostly helmetless, drunk young men . The common factor of a jama is that it is THERE: it has a stubborn, unwelcome there-ness which provokes in most of us a seeming hapless helplessnesses and absence of skilful means.
E scooter platforms in crowded urban spaces are a jama par excellence, and we allow ourselves to be their collective victims. If we allow ourselves to be hapless before the jama.
The ‘so’ questions then: so… why do we allow this? So…. why have the platforms persisted for the past several years? What are their enabling conditions, reasons; who are the scooters’ entourage of protectors and defenders?
This is the focus of the next post.
This is a kind of ?riposte? to Horkheimer, who would chide his postwar American sociologists for cranking out empirical work that was ‘insufficiently dialectical’ – by which he really meant ‘not Marxist enough in the way I mean it, which is how it should be’, but which, more broadly since Hegel-Marx, means: dealing with society’s fundamental contradictions. For me as a post-Marxist pluralist Luhmannian of some kind, I think this really means dealing with consumption and especially distribution, and looking at urban and global scale at the primacy of circulation. This was how I thought about temporary security bollards on a theoretical level, and it’s how I think we should think about the system of automobility; it’s not (just) about cars (or: what are cars ‘about’?).
The timing is very interesting. This was the year in which dockless bike schemes were rolled out worldwide; it was also the year that Zuboff published Age of Surveillance Capitalism and Carreyrou published Bad Blood (on Theranos),the year before tech critical pieces on Uber (Super Pumped) and others began to flood out. But 2018 was a year in which dockless bike schemes – and disruption generally – still seemed like the great saving idea of post GFC Anglocapitalism.
There’s quite a bit of research you can Google: it skews young (20s, 30s), it skews male. 60-80% young dudes, basically. People who could walk. They are not mobility scooters.
It’s interesting though that, unlike e skateboards and mono wheels, the handlebars paradoxically lower the bar to entry, allowing the ‘meerkats’ in our midst to hop on and pop up on them, as it were; they move beyond the tiny niche of diehards who can/want to ride such contraptions (and usually mono wheel and e skateboard riders are highly skilled yahoos).
In what follows, when I’m speaking of e scooters, I’m primarily thinking of deployed platforms (like those of Lime and Neuron), not private-discretionary folding e scooters of the kind that Segway and Niu manufacture – which, like smoking or vaping, I regard as a regrettable personal choice that people with free will can certainly make should they wish. Secondly, in what follows, I’m thinking of e scooters in urban spaces like those of Paris or Melbourne: this is a very different proposition to highly spread out 20C-style ‘urban’ planning (like WB Griffin’s Canberra), outer suburban, and rural-regional areas, where there is often inadequate public transport and there can often be 5–8km trips to work and transport hubs which are not affordably achievable in a reasonable amount of time (where you can’t walk in <30 minutes). In such places, e scooters start making a lot of sense (but then, so does good urban planning [stop building developer-driven car-dependent suburban sprawl with no public transport infrastructure, on the urban fringe!], and so do bicycles and decent public transport, which, like walkability, should be planned around and integral.
It’s people gendered-gendering as women who don’t feel safe; and when women and subordinate genders tend to feel fear and avoid cycling, it drives down participation and also increases intermodal hostility (the remaining cyclists are aggressive die hard dudes, yelling back at aggressive dudes in SUVs, etc etc)
This is a sneaky one, because the ‘final mile problem’ is an – expensive! – problem for logistics, per Amazon in NYC. The language and discourse piggybacked into transport problems, via disruption, making it seem like delivering a person was like delivering a package.