Car Tyranny
Blinded by what we have never known
Technology is never neutral.
Anyone who proposes this is a technophile midwit at best or someone actively trying to deceive you at worst.
Much of the focus of discourse around technology today centers on what we consider novel technologies that we interact with. Computers and screens and then the programs that run on them. Social media. Pornography is far more ubiquitous and easy to consume via this technology for example and so it has become a more pressing issue than when it was relegated to VHS tapes and print magazines. We are all hyper aware of just how disruptive these newer technologies are because most of us remember a time before.
That ability to remember a time before shows the alternative to a technology. This realm of how life worked when not everyone was reachable all the time. People used meeting places and meeting boards - people called landlines and left messages places for example. You had more firmly agreed upon meeting times or curfews. Frankly I can’t imagine being a kid today where you are always reachable via a phone but I’m sure many parents can’t imagine not wanting to be able to get in touch with their kid. Technology is never neutral it always has an impact for better or worse.
There is a technology that has been around for so long that we have effectively forgotten what it was like before that. The technology of the car. Competing transport technologies of course still exist with us but they are now all totally subservient to the car. The car is the number one mode of transport across the West it seems to me. We still have technology from before like trains but those have been rapidly abandoned in favor of cars. A great many sensible rightists are of course train appreciators, but a few are not. Indeed it is somewhat taboo still to criticize the car. We get a lot of the extreme midwit WEF conspiracy crowd for example. These people become incredibly agitated if you suggest to them that the car should not be the cornerstone of life. In truth like most of the plebs we are helplessly enslaved by the car and the infrastructure it demands.
Cars Destroyed our Cities is a popular account and makes many great points. It highlights the destruction wrought by the car and the horrible aesthetic choices that are popular because of it. Cars also allowed for white flight. In your own car of course you don’t have to deal with the problem of a misbehaving minority in quite the same way. They are still a menace on the roads but the in your face problems we see them cause on subways around the world can’t touch you in the car. The car and its technology facilitated an abandonment of community in a way that is hard to describe exactly because it has been this way for so long, especially if you have only lived in America. Yet there are lots of places still where cars aren’t quite as dominant. There is both a terrible tyranny and freedom in the car - in the same way a small community has the same. Everyone knows who you are but you have the comfort of that. Some people bridle at that and can’t wait to move away to the larger town, to disappear into anonymity where they aren’t ‘Susan’s Daughter’ but all too soon they realize what they had. In being known and part of a community there is both a price to pay and benefits.
Our relationship with the car is similar. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy long cross country drives but as a way to get around a town or city cars suck. To me they are also representative of the destructive liberal individualism that has altered our societies. People behave differently in cars - their stress levels are higher. You feel trapped. Road rage major and minor is a real thing, I know this because I suffer from it. You are in complex powerful machines but constrained by the actions of others and most understand there are serious consequences that result from mistakes. If you bump into someone at walking pace through not looking that isn’t a big deal, done in a car it has serious effects. Car commuting for most people is miserable - it’s one reason that so many people in the white collar class want to work remotely. Yet people cling to these objects that enslave them.
It could be so different. I didn’t learn to drive until quite late in life. I had no need, public transport sufficed and yes it still got me out into nature. Part of the madness of modern life is about the scale we try to live. Again the midwit plebs will cry about ‘15 minute cities’ without realizing they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. People in London cheer the ULEZ vandals without thinking of the hours of life they while away sat in a car. The individualism of the car is ever present in our lives and people are terrified of it in so many ways. They can’t imagine a future without it - in part because they fear another truth about technology. It makes you weak. Every defender of the car struggles with this - it makes you lazy and fat. It promises you more time to waste. I’m guilty of this. A 20 minute walk to the shops or a quick car ride? But every time I walk it is better - that time I thought I ‘needed’ is found somewhere else. Walking feels good, carrying the groceries feels good. You are part of somewhere. They know this through studies with Police of course - Police driving through are not felt by the community in the same way as Police walking the streets.
What about the rural? I can already hear people sputtering and gasping. The car enables rural life! Does the city not still draw people in, in their cars away from the rural. Is the rural life you live today really in any way at all similar to your ancestors? Couldn’t you walk or cycle or ride a horse between neighbors? The car seduces you into isolation. It presents itself as the only option - and that is where we started. It is next to impossible for most of us to imagine a life without the car. Of course we know it existed and we know for a time a car was a luxury item. Not everyone had one, there were buses or trains the transport the masses. If we are to drift into utopian day dreaming to me there is nothing more perfect of an ideal than railways and cycling making up the majority of transportation. It’s a silly day dream and I acknowledge it as such but what many are still unwilling to talk about and engage with is the tyranny of the car. That technology really has pushed us into worse places in my mind - it accentuates the worst elements of individualism, it disconnects us from the land more than it connects us to it. Technology is never neutral. The car is not neutral. It remains an object many cling to, on both sides of the political divide. It is something beyond politics.
Perhaps the future I talk of will be reality - that on that long scale timeline the resources are exhausted and people are back to not having cars. They become a luxury good before that of course. That future is not one I’ll live to see instead we have to live in a present dominated by this system we have built. The car won’t save you from mass migration, you can’t drive away from it. If anything the car enables them to go to you. The car is an atomizer. Once it held promise like all new technologies - the best of which always promise a form of liberation as they enslave you. No doubt this polemic might irritate some of you - you think it falls in line with the WEF globalist desires. The truth is you are already enslaved by the system they have designed for you today but have lost the ability to see the bars.