Some are saying things, some are just doing stuff because they can. I’m not convinced it’s any less sane than, say, working in finance. It’s definitely less harmful.
The thing about art is that it’s whatever you can get away with. Sometimes that leaves room for powerful critiques of the system, sometimes it’s just random stuff. In order to survive in capitalism, artists have to keep producing art. This means that they’re incentiveized to produce things that are meaningless… Which is what most people in society do most of the time.
So these folks take some drugs and externalize the absurdity rather than fume in an office for decades before snapping and shooting a bunch of people or just offing themselves. Is it crazier to throw the absurdity of society back in it’s face, or pretend that any of this is OK?
Edit: How many people reading this are pretending to work? You could be outside touching grass. You could be inside by a fire. Every minute you spend pretending to work is a waste of your life. Imagine if you threw your computer against the wall, walked out of the office, covered yourself in paint, and started flopping against a canvas like a fish. Would you experience more joy than you are experiencing right now, trapped at work pretending to do something meaningful? Yeah, I’m gonna go back to work but I’m also not gonna judge.
Yeah, I have two kids. We used an eBike in the US. The Dutch would find your comment absolutely hilarious. We do not own a car and haven’t needed one since we moved to the Netherlands. The problem is that you have a proprietary transit infrastructure that forces you to use property cars. Infrastructure is your vendor lock in.
The majority of car trips are under one mile and have one passenger. In the vast majority of cases you can replace a car with an eBike.
This just reminds me of someone else saying something like every time you suggest a car replacement suddenly everyone needs to carry a couch 300 miles in the snow.
It is not possible to be free while you have a car. But yeah, some times your forced in to that by the complete failure of American infrastructure. Cars continue to be your worst option, even if you’re forced to use them.
Edit: Correction, over 60% are under 5 miles, 28% are under a mile. Only 2% are over 50 miles. 69% of the total annual vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. occur in urban areas. In 2019, average car occupancy was 1.5 persons per vehicle.chart showing 75% of trips driving alone
IMHO, It makes sense though. Piracy and open source are two approaches to attacking the enclosure of public (intellectual) space. Roads for cars are literally an enclosure of public space. The subscription model just extends from this logic.
Edit: These are also things that make sense because the car has to have cell service via a provider.
I lived in rural California and Oregon for a while and there was just nothing. You had a car or you couldn’t live. Wanna get groceries? Drive, because it’s too far to bike and even if you did you’d probably get killed by a car. Wanna get your mail? Drive to the post office. Don’t bike because you’ll get hit by a semi. Wanna go see a movie in a theatre? Yeah, drive for at least half an hour to get to the closest one. But both of the towns I spent the most time in burned to the ground in wildfires so… Yeah…
But it’s good to hear not all of the US is hopeless and some of it is almost functional. I hope at least some parts survive, because there’s a whole lot that just can’t exist without cars and cars can’t exist forever.
Absolutely. If you can bike, it’s amazing. We went mostly car free for our last 6 months in the US. It was both wonderful and horrible. There are so many places it’s just not safe to go on a bike, but not being in a car reduces your stress levels so much it’s hard to imagine.
Some of it forces you to think about what you’re doing with your life. That alone is a redeeming value. Most of that means nothing to me or is funny out of context, but the context could make everything. Or it could be bad. I’m not sure that it matters, but it’s really difficult to impossible without knowing the context (like, who’s the audience).
If I made a joke about tech, I’m guessing you might get it but most folks wouldn’t. Does that mean the joke isn’t funny or that the other people just aren’t in on it?
If you are stuck in a place that actually requires a car then this makes sense. Between the two you’ll save a ton of money.
In the long term though vehicle to vehicle communication will be required for all cars on the road. You will have (probably property) computer in your car controlling it. Unless you go back to like the 80’s or something you’ll still have a proprietary computer in your car that will need to be replaced.
But even getting a bike for occasional trips prepares you for gas prices spiking or your car breaking down.
I think your question is answered word for word in the video, but tl;dr: yes, I think that a genre where those who wish to disrupt the social order are automatically cast as villains can only be constructed as progressive when the villain is literally Hitler. Obviously there’s a lot more nuance in the video, but that’s the gist of it.
I don’t think they’re even a solution. They’re just another scam like hydrogen fuel cells were. They exist to keep people from pushing for the real change we actually need… Just like the decade we lost because people bought the hydrogen fuel cell grift last time.
Everyone sucks at driving. Humans simply don’t have an innate comprehension of the physics of muti-ton metal boxes moving at high speeds or the physical reactions necessary to operate them safely. Even if we actually did, there are underlying psychological phenomenon that make people bad at driving. Humans are social animals, but when you isolate them in a metal box they stop being able to read social queues and start seeing everything outside the car as just obsticals instead of other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians.
There are dozens of reasons driving is extremely bad for everyone involved, and why it feels awful for most people most of the time.