Of Cars, freedom and adventure
Media narratives and mythology around cars and my love of public transport, some great articles and links and a stunning town I fell in love with.
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This week I had a close encounter. A reckless driver made me see the face of Death. My heart was beating out of my chest. I couldn’t hear the music in the car anymore.
All I could hear was my heart. All I could think was all the things that I still wanted to do in life.
Thankfully, I was able to say hello and goodbye.
Death went away.
I continued rolling along the road, more cautiously, more aware of everyone around me as I tried to regain my composure.
So, I thought I’d talk about cars this week and the narrative/mythology we’ve been sold about them.
We all know the narrative car ads sell. It has become ubiquitous. Cars are freedom and adventure. They free us from the shackles of having to travel by public transport or being stuck in our community. Car ads are usually about adventure and freedom and this has been the narrative for decades.
But it wasn’t always like this.
Once upon a time the streets of our towns and cities were full of people going for a walk, of elderly people out for a bit of sun and a little stroll, for people talking to other people, people playing football, young children walking a couple of blocks to find their friends and then playing out in the street... Roads and streets belonged to everyone and they were an open public space.
Then, cars were invented and the wealthy people who owned cars were a menace. A real menace.
Cars charged through the streets terrorising people and when I say terrorising, I mean it. In the U.S. and Europe tens of thousands died every year due to collisions. In Jeff Sparrow’s Crimes Against Nature, he recounts:
In 1925 alone, cars killed 21,000 Americans, most of whom were on foot. By our standards that number might not seem huge, given that current highway fatalities outnumber the yearly toll in any war America ever fought.
As Sparrow recounts in his marvellous book (and I highly recommend it), back then these casualties were significant and a lot of the people killed were children, so communities turned against the mechanic monsters and their wealthy drivers. Working class people wanted to preserve the streets for everyone and they railed against the colonisation of public streets and roads.
Very early in this criminal war of conquest, Woodrow Wilson, before he became president, said that:
Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in the country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman, they are of [the] arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.
Inevitably, as deaths mounted, people started attacking drivers. They threw stones, bottles and whatever was at hand to them. Protests became common in both the U.S. and Europe. Petitions to limit the use of cars in streets and to limit their speed became common too.
But, of course, the wealthy and the car makers fought back. They acted swiftly and invested heavily in turning public opinion around. They said progress was inevitable (exactly, the same they’re saying with general purpose AI now) and mocked those who resisted invasion of cars. The car lobby invented the term jaywalking and quickly spread its use, in order to blame pedestrians (in other words, the victims, the people being killed). They even paid actors and dressed them with outdated, ridiculous clothes, or as clowns to make it even more obvious, to act as jaywalkers in public parades in support of cars.
I won’t go further into that, you can read Jeff Sparrow’s Crimes Against Nature for more, or you can read Joseph Stromberg’s excellent piece The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking” on Vox.
But why do I mention all this? Because it’s happened again and again. Pedestrians are criminalised, cyclists are criminalised (the hate drivers show for cyclists will never cease to astound me) and cars continue to get away with murder.
Not content with having towns, cities and whole nations designed around cars and roads, some car tech companies are now keen to roll out self driving cars.
I like technology, I love science fiction and I hate driving. Self driving cars sound like the stuff of dreams. On paper, I should be excited. Instead, I just see it as another instance of tech companies marching ahead in their usual move fast, break things, no matter the cost way. Ironically, in many ways, the rollout of cars was the first rollout of tech that people rebelled to but companies forced on them.
And it feels like nothing will stop them. Despite some serious incidents and Cruise, one of the initial big players, being ordered to phase out their self driving cars back in 2023 after a serious incident, they keep marching ahead with the rollout. Waymo (owned by Google) wants to start rolling out self driving cars in New South Wales though Australia is not ready for self driving cars. And thankfully, half of Australians in a recent survey were opposed to self driving cars on our roads.
Here’s the thing though, the self driving car technology has reached a point where they’re pretty safe but is this really the model we want to follow? Self driving cars will not solve the traffic problem. In fact, electric cars will not solve the problem either.
Instead of everyone driving their own car, getting stuck in traffic, building more roads, adding more lanes, more car parks… what if we could expand public transport and ensure that public transport is affordable (dare I say free) and convenient (with good coverage of lines and frequent)?
There are some positive signs. Melbourne, the city with the biggest tram network in the world is, finally, after more than 50 years expanding the tram network. It’s astonishing that it’s taken more than five decades for Melbourne to add to their tram network but it’s a positive sign, together with the news that all public transport will be free on weekends all through summer and children under 18 will be able to travel free from January 1 2026.
In fact, imagine if we made public transport free, if we didn’t need all the tech around ticketing systems and barriers, if we could do away with ticket inspectors, and instead invested those savings in improving the public transport system itself with more trams, trains and buses. Queensland has had 50 cent public transport tickets no matter the distance travelled for a while now. The result? Less cars on the road, less cars in city centres and more public transport use. The new elected mayor of New York Mamdani is promising free buses across New York.
Imagine, if instead of expanding and widening roads to try to fit more cars, we made a conscious and concerted effort to fully develop public transport. That’s what Paris and France have been doing. In France, they’ve building tram networks in multiple cities in the last 25 years. In Paris, they started building the tram network in the early 90s and they’ve been building it so much that it’s fast approaching Melbourne’s coverage.
And that’s the thing, we already have and have had cleaner and more efficient modes of transport for longer than cars have existed. Trains and trams are far more efficient, safe and less polluting. The same goes for electric buses. Next time you’re in a traffic jam, or moving at 20kmh in a four lane freeway, remember that it didn’t have to be this way.
Maybe, I have a warped view. Maybe, I’m missing something. Maybe, I’m just a naive dreamer. Or maybe, there was a little purple pocket book that my dad put in my hands, just as I was turning 18, that changed my mind and my life in another perfect example of the power of the written word.
The book (sadly long out of print) was in Spanish, in a small pocket format and in 80 pages, it made a very compelling case against cars. The blunt title, designed to provoke was, Cars: Those murderers that kill thousands every day with total impunity, and it was written by Justo de la Cueva, a sociologist and journalist.
I was thinking whether I should go for a driver’s licence, all my friends did, but after I read the book I made the choice to not to go for it. The book helped me make the decision and contrary to the mainstream narrative, I felt free. Free to write and read while commuting on trains and buses. Something I would never be able to do while driving. In fact, still to this day, my favourite place to read is probably a train and most of my poems have started as scribbles while commuting on public transport.
I have a car these days and it’s useful sometimes but I dream of the day when I can get rid of it and be free again. Free to go on more train adventures with a book, a notebook and a pen.
PROJECT UPDATE
It’s been busy but I found a little of time and I have continued writing my fantasy novel this week. I’ve started Part III of the book which is titled: The Mountains. I’m usually not a fast writer when it comes to fiction but I think (and hope) that Part III will be different. I have a clear idea of what needs to happen in the story and it revolves around the First Born in my mythology, commonly referred to as dwarves. As much as I love Tolkien’s writings, I always felt that he didn’t do justice to the noble dwarves, so I’m keen to tell a story with dwarves my way.
KICKING AROUND THE NET
Cory Greenwood published a must read piece a few days ago about the importance of libraries being loud and proud communicating what we do and the value of our sector to the community. An excellent read that makes a very strong case for libraries and library institutions coordinating for common language, communications and campaigns.
Libraries in the U.S. are reporting they’re receiving constant offers to for AI products to bring efficiency to the library. This typically means, automated ways for AI to catalogue items and to evaluate and rate the appropriateness of texts, essentially helping to sideline titles the AI deems problematic - which is titles by marginalised authors and dealing with themes the current administration wants erased. Great reporting by Jason Koebler from 404 Media here.
A group of teenagers organised themselves and overturned a ban for 8 out of 20 titles in the state of Georgia’s Helen Ruffin Reading Bowl. It’s a great story, it really is, but it really shouldn’t be up to high school students to fight bans! As Kelly Jensen says on Book Riot(I recommend reading the whole article BTW):
This isn’t a mess they’ve created; it’s one created by adults who fail to recognize children and teenagers are autonomous individuals with their own rights. They are not property of their parents, of their educational institutions, nor of the country itself. But time and time again, it is young people who are stepping up and speaking out about the impact that book bans–instigated by grown adults lodging absurd accusations of such books being “inappropriate,” “explicit,” or “pornographic”–are having on their lives.
Australia banned horror movies for about two decades. Pop culture historian Daniel Best explores those years in an excellent post here.
A group of authors and publishers are suing Open AI and the case is moving forward, despite Open AI’s objections. This is pretty positive.
Microsoft has extended an apology and says they will refund users who don’t want the far more expensive Microsoft 365 subscription with Copilot AI that they deviously forced them to take. The ACCC says they will continue to pursue the matter in the courts and I really hope they do.
Matt Bevan has a knack for packing a lot of information into a short video (and podcast), making it entertainment and explaining complex issues in a way that’s easy to understand. His latest video explores the true cost of AI and it’s a ripper.
Talking about media narratives, we’re being sold a narrative that general purpose AI is inevitable. That, all the social harms it’s causing, the people that have died because of it(it’s not an exaggeration, people have died), the theft of books, movies, music and intellectual property, is all inevitable, but it’s not. It doesn’t need to be inevitable as Oxford Professor of Economics Maximilian Kasy brilliantly argues in this excellent article.
Karen Hao’s The Empire of AI is one of the most fascinating and important books of the year. I can’t recommend it enough. One of the key themes of the book is that we should not be focusing so much on the AI doomsday scenarios into the future. There are plenty of harms already taking place right now and one of them is AI psychosis. The short documentary below is a powerful watch.
https://youtu.be/zkGk_A4noxI?si=pud6wD1GJilzmpuQAnd I’ll wrap up with an interesting report that gives me hope. I’ve always loved technology and I’ve been an early adopter the internet and of most devices but now that I’ve seen how the promise of an open source, free internet connecting people and communities has falled into the dark side, now that we see the harmful effects of a few big tech companies controlling our internet use and social media, it gives me hope to see how young people, who are digital natives, are critical and ambivalent about tech. New research by the UK’s National Standards Body reveals (among many other interesting things) that half (47%) of young people aged 16 to 21 would prefer to be young in a world without the internet. They may enjoy tech, they may like their phones and the may see the value of the internet but they have also seen the dark side and that gives me hope.
PHOTO OF THE DAY
Some places are magical. They have something that sets them apart. Something that cannot be quantified. Yes, the old buildings, the snow… it’s picturesque for sure. But this town has something else. A sense of history, a sense of beauty that cannot be measured and can hardly be described in words. When I was there, I felt like I was in one of those villages I’ve visited in so many fantasy books, and yet, Český Krumlov is real, very real. People have lived there since the Stone Age. It was bloody freezing when we were there (my iPod totally froze and stopped working until I put it next to a heater) but what a wonderful three days we had exploring the town.
That’s it from me for now. Hopefully you found something interesting. Feel free to share with whoever you like. This newsletter is free and will always be free. It’s shared with a Creative Commons BY ND licence which enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator.
