stupid, stubborn, surreal (3S)
a recap and bridge post, to keep things clear and navigable – for both of us
When I started this series, I envisaged it maybe in three parts of no more than 2-3000 words. Tragicomically, the points and ideas have continued to calve and hive off; it’s not such a bad problem to have, ultimately, but in the meantime, it’s easy – including for me – to start to feel disoriented by it.
This post, then, is just a way of keeping this bouquet in hand.
It should also prepare the way for the final post this week, which will move from momentum and path dependence toward reflecting on the elusiveness of empathy and a mature politics in 3S imbroglios like e-scooters. Why is this so hard; why have we tended to handle such imbroglios so badly? Ultimately, there’s a collective action problem here, and its a signature of our time, as much of the zeitgeist as its stupid, stubborn, surreality (3S).
If you want the short way back, 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.
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.
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.
What now follows is a few more notes that try to bed this in… it’s here if it’s helpful, but the above should hopefully orient, give you a chance to go back, should you wish, and prepare for the final set of political reflections, which I’ll be drafting this week.
Thank you for paying attention!
~
In this series so far – parts – I’ve tried to do a few things.
First of all, I tried to name ‘the shit we’re in’ (echoing this): I’ve said that 2024’s zeitgeist is stupid, stubborn and surreal (3S). A second failed attempt on the life of an orange felon on Monday September 16th (so many guns, so little marksmanship!) and recent Musk tweets in verse, indicate I might be onto something: the stupid is still stubbornly there, surreally survived – and one of them could still soon be president once more1.
Then, I named e-scooters as a signature 3S of our lives right now, and I tried to say why e-scooter platforms are futile as a transport system – even for the Swishers who love them.
Noticing the absence and necessity of an account of disruption in the emergence of e-scooters, I posted my long piece on Uber (link above) as a paradigm-setting case study in post GFC early-to-mid 2010s ‘blurred lines’ disruption. With Uber, what we saw was not only the competitive individualism of neoliberalism (see here now), or just the ‘move quickly and break things’ version of Facebook-style Stanford frat bro libertarianism. Rather, Uber had an ethos2, closer to that of successful crime organisations, and kinda shared by Google with Maps, that glommed these statements:
“violence guarantees success”,
“better to ask for forgiveness than permission”,
“always be hustlin’”.
As ‘blurred lines disruption’, Uber was a big bezzle – and may have been a racket. But we loved it: and, for a while, loved Uber for it3.
In trying to get at ‘what it is’ about e-scooters, I tried to explain that transport is never about transport. E-scooters, as a purported transport system (a gratitous gadget that camouflages its own uselessness and stupidity), aren’t (just) about Swishers getting about ‘looking fantastic’, Musks decrying they ‘lack dignity’, and Dinkers joyriding them on a Friday evening. E-scooters are about us: they address us, not just as potential riders, but also in the difficulties of living together somehow in a community of fate.
So, for me, e-scooters are a way of showing how these difficulties transpire as imbroglios at urban scale – where different groups of different strangers, none of whom share a conception of the good and the just, have to somehow share the goods life. As a global logistics that delivers the goods – and with the effortless blasting around of e-scotters, delivers the buzz – this is often offered up in lieu of fairness, responsibility and accountability, the things we ‘can’t have’, that collective action and the tense compromises of politics ‘wont’ give us, but that Musk and the other tech bros are trying to ‘solution’ with gadgets and platforms. We can’t have a better Springfield (link below), but we can haz monorail – and many of us are mad for this, they want it bad.
At the outset of that post, I also tried to bring the political stakes of e-scooters into focus by placing their efflorescence alongside some other similar new stupids in Berlin (here and here). This also intimated the importance of culture wars and reactivity here (as well as the kinds of imbroglios that grab and hog attention and also provide fuel for their own embiggenment): and e-scooters are catnip to the dogwhistlers, they’re perfect fodder for a shitty little culture war that will misdirect us from real problems and consume huge amounts of attention and energy. This is where the final post in this series will try to reflect: where can we try to find a mature politics in all this; with what skills and aptitudes might we develop toward one? This is as elusive as it is important right now.
So then: what comes out of e-scooters so far?
It’s the absence of and demand for a mature politics.
It’s the snow leopard-level elusiveness of a sensible set of ways of acknowledging one another’s different-uncomfortable-disagreeing existence,
and
ways and means of making cities better by making them better (unlike the reactionary move right now, which is about making things better by making them worse, then doubling down and ramping up when ‘it’ doesn’t work out).
This would be about fully facing one another and staying with the trouble so we have half a chance of working through our actual problems.
It would be about trying to solve things together, with patience and skilful means, in ways that build self-efficacy and avoid spiralling into the disaffections of corruption and cynicism (same thing) and the ‘hard cut off’ secessions of the successful into business lounges, VIP areas, gated communities, helipads, bunkers in Otago, colonies on Mars and Venus.
A consequential political point that follows if you still think e-scooters are just gadgets: if we can’t navigate a wise and prudent way through e-scooters, when so little is at stake, compared to war and climate change, what fucking hope have we?
The way e-scooters are playing out, then, for me, is sign and signal of what we’re probably capable of. Which could be quite humbling.
It’s not just a descriptive analysis of a signature stupid, it’s a diagnosis, and maybe an indictment, of an upper limit problem in our collective life right now.
Incidentally, I re-watched the ‘89 Batman on the weekend (strengths and weaknesses!) and it’s hilariously prescient and weird how much Nicholson’s Batman kinda intimates Trump; even the orange makeup hiding the ghastly chemical bleached hair, and Jerry Hall as girlfriend. What does it mean that American political life has imitated art in this way; what does it mean that a once and hopeful president-felon is a caricature villain in a Tim Burton movie? ‘This town needs an enema!’
Re-casting John Goodman’s Walter Sobchak in Big Lebowski remonstrating against nihilism: ‘say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism – at least it’s an ethos!’
It’s true you can love someone for bezelling you: I think of the monorail con artist, Lyle Lanley, in the classic Simpsons episode. Surely Scientology shows us this: a percentage of people not only ‘want to believe’ (pace the X Files), they WANT you to con them. Cue Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’.