TRASHFUTURE - Automobile Conversation Part 1 of 2 ft. Paris Marx

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Paris Marx of Tech Won’t Save Us and the author of Road to Nowhere talks to us for PART ONE of our two-part series on driverless cars, which we have titled Automobile Conversation - and it is NOT legally affiliated with “Car Talk.” If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to this Hang-On checking what day it is, free episode of TF. It's the free one. I was hoping that when I'd say, and you noticed. No, I was deputized to do this. I'm not using a good microphone. I was trying to do an ASMR version, so it's the free one. And we are here today, myself, Alice in Hussain. We are here to speak with our friend, a returning guest of multiple times.

It's Tech Won't Save Us's Paris Marks, who has also written a book. A book entitled Road to Nowhere. Paris, how's it going? Great. I'm so happy to be back on the show chatting about the book. It's wild that it's nearly at the point where it's going to be out there, so that's pretty cool. Absolutely. And of course, this is a book about self-driving frigates and man-a-wars.

I'm going to expert on those. Essentially, yeah, we have automated Captain Jack Aubrey. And Oceans, I regret to say it, are now battlefields, but automated ones. It's the one thing we didn't want to happen. No, it's the three of us. We're kicking off. What is, in fact, a very special week for TF. That's right.

It's the Banquet of Forgiveness. No, that's go James Bond. No, it's Love Day. No, no, sorry. That's the War of the Roses. We are kicking off a very special week. It is, of course. The Queen's 70th Diamond Jubilee.

Let me kick off a special week. It is the week, because I just remembered when this will be released. It's the week of Crossrail. It's the week of the Elizabeth line opening, which is actually very good and special week. Finally, Hussein will be able to get into London. We're finally going to meet Hussein. I'll finally get to go to Tiger Tiger, which is always what I wanted, but I wasn't able to because southeast and rail ends at 11 p.m.

You've got all the card tricks that you're going to do. Bringing up the Queen, though. Prince Charles and Camilla are over here visiting Canada at the moment. Unfortunately, yeah, we haven't gotten rid of them yet. We're still a monarchy, sadly. Could you not just quietly encircle them with a big convoy of cross? I could work. We're known for that now. It was funny, though.

He was at a local brewery. He was actually here in my city where they visited. There's this video going around Canadian Twitter where he's at a beer tap, like filling up a glass, and then he smells it and turns his face. It's the most disgusting thing he's ever smelled in his life. Hey, look, that's only OK to do to Alexander Keats, all right? He's just a very relatable man, I think. No, I think that's really cool that he gets to live in a pretty old house.

Prince Charles beer gif. Here's the thing. I'm going to introduce the week that we're kicking off. The very special week, which we are tentatively calling automobile discussion. It is not legally affiliated with Car Talk. Yeah, absolutely. We have nothing to do with Car Talk because on Car Talk, they let the host announce the week that it is.

Vehicle conversation. It's the free one. You don't have to pay for it. Welcome, indeed, to automobile discussion, vehicle conversation, whatever it is. I promise it's not Car Talk. This is going to be the first of two episodes talking about the history, prospects, and technical details of, especially with regard to surveillance, the electric self-driving car, how it fits into the history of transportation generally, and how car makers have consistently, whether they like to brand themselves as saving the planet,

or if they just like nakedly represented their own oil-based interests, have consistently remade the world in which they live for the worst for everyone. So that's going to be a pile of a pile of laughs. I thought this was a show about how much we love cars and we want them to stick around forever. No, I'm running that show in parallel after we finish with Milo. Oh, damn. No, sorry. That one is Car Talk. You were thinking of Car Talk.

No, this is automobile discussion. I could see how you'd make the error. But look, I wanted to talk about a couple of news items first, one very quickly, and one with a little more detail before we get into... Coming off the big TF news ticker here. What do we have here? It's some transphobia. Alice, do you want to read the... In the UK, what?

Do you want to read the exchange between Starmer and Johnson? I know. It was very strange. Keir Starmer asked the Prime Minister, what did he even ask him? He said, a one-off tax on huge oil and gas profits would raise billions of pounds cutting energy bills across the country. Are you going to do a windfall tax and if not, why not? And then very forensically, Boris Johnson just went, ah, you don't even know what a woman is.

So that's the sort of honest level that transphobia has now sort of settled down to, is that like a sort of ambient house of commons braying to diffuse any sort of like difficult questions or questions that you just don't feel like answering. Which is great. I feel very comfortable with that. Well, it's like, look, I think our long position on the show whenever we've discussed transphobia has always been like the view that, oh, this is a distraction from the real economy stuff is not correct. Like this is an ideology. This specific manifestation is purely a sort of like a smoke bomb thrown down.

Like the material stuff, the like, you know, the self-ID stuff, any of the funding of gender identity clinics or questioning how they work, how a gender recognition certificate works, any of the sort of like a day-to-day cultural moment that we find ourselves in where I'm terrified to enter a changing room. That's material. This contributes to it, certainly, but this is very much sort of a tactical sort of like, you just throw this down and you escape to the next thing.

And it's, you know, as sort of venal and thoughtless and cruel as we would come to expect. But yeah, great, fantastic. They call it the Englishman's distraction. It was certainly interesting to see the way that the UK has chosen to, or the UK conservatives have chosen to, you know, distract from the cost of living crisis over here in Canada. You know, the politicians just pretend that they care and then do nothing. But over there, they're just like, oh, transphobia, we don't need to respond to these questions. Well, see, that's the Stalmerist view, right?

Is that like instead of doing transphobia, you simply say, oh, well, what we should do is maybe some means testing and then you don't even do the means testing. Yeah. You stay as transphobic, but you're much more quiet about it. Yes. You let your colleagues be loud about it. But in this case, it is just, it is also, I wanted to pull up as well, right? Hey, all of you liberal, just asking questions, quote unquote, transphobes.

You got your culture war. Yeah. Enjoy your heating, Bill. Absolutely. Yeah. I hope that the spike keeps you warm because nothing else will. Yeah. Well, maybe that's a strategy.

But and also just like, you know, Keir Starmer should be because Keir Starmer doesn't know what a woman is. He doesn't understand how periods can like generate hot flushes. And those hot flushes should mean that you shouldn't have to spend that much on your heating bills. Of course, Boris Johnson knows very well what a woman is because he has to work out what to harass. That's right. I thought you get hot flashes when you get menopause. I'm not quite answering this question. Not sure.

Not sure. I am. Look, right in. Not to us. Just anywhere. Right. If you, if you know, if you know what a woman is or how one works, DM us. Look, don't get mad at me.

I'm getting married to a woman so I can find out all these things. But yeah, it is, it is. But this is the problem because it's because I've been like gay before. It means I don't know all these things, which is why I'm now going to be canceled and told that like, I don't know what a woman is in this very busy. I'm going to find myself like, yeah, I'm going to find myself. But basically this is like the long game because I really want a column for unheard. No, he wouldn't. Yeah.

Sorry. Look, I think we're all very excited to when you go to find out what a woman is, which in Boris Johnson's case is something that you can impregnate and then forget about. I'm excited to turn up to activate my new generation of smart meter, which asks me about chromosomes. Yeah, like long gametes or whatever. One more thing before we accelerate, as we say here in automobile discussion. I want to also talk about some developments in the States that are, I'd say most perturbatory. Most perturbatory.

Specifically, that the SEC, an organization that for decades now has basically been a long job interview to go work for a bank where the interview is testing. How much will you let us get away with? Yes. Their last fang has been removed now by the Fifth Circuit Court. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. If the SEC wants to seize your assets and they want to do that administratively, that violates your constitutional right to a jury trial. Yeah. Which, I suppose, fair enough, right?

It's never a bad thing to have too much oversight in this sense. But you may also be familiar with a little case called Patel versus Garland, which the Supreme Court just decided, which is that the United States, the federal judiciary has no power to review facts in discretionary hearings under federal immigration law. So ICE, Customs and Border Protection, they have an absolute sort of administrative fiat in Patel versus Garland. It was a guy who had ticked the wrong box when he was applying for a driver's license and then 20 years later had been like deported over it. So that's not reviewable by any sort of federal court. However, any SEC action they might choose to take, that is, and you can sort of waste out the federal government court. Yeah. Let's say, for example, that you have a car company called, I don't know, Edison.

Yes. You know, you really love posting on Instagram. The key thing here is that this isn't any sort of a judicial theory, and this isn't a novel observation. To say that the right has no sort of like unifying jurisprudence, it's purely an exercise of power. That's been true for ages. It's like, so what? And I think the so what here is that this is an exercise of power that is not merely sort of consequential, but almost suicidal to having a functional federal government. And, you know, that doesn't seem to bother anybody.

So long as they can keep the deportations going, then, you know, certainly the hypocrisy is not going to stop anyone. Oh, heavens, no. And I mean, I think this is this actually does sort of dovetail into a lot of other stuff you've talked about, both with regards to cars, but also with regards to like tech companies and the financing behind them generally, which is that a lot of these situations, again, we won't talk about any directly, sort of, you might say, cry out for SEC enforcement. And certainly, you know, the big, we can't, I mean, we can talk about this directly. It's just established fact. Like Elon Musk has found himself on the wrong side of the of the SEC numerous times for, you know, his moronic as tweets. Yeah.

And that, you know, this has essentially, they have been able to, they have been able to, you know, discipline him in a drop in the bucket sense. Yeah, the slapping on the wrist and now the slapping arm has just been cut off with a katana. So, I mean, I want to know, just from the perspective of what you're looking at in cars and tech companies generally, I mean, this sort of withering away of the administrative state, how does that strike you, Paris? Yeah, it's, it's a serious problem, right? Because especially when we look at what Elon Musk is doing, but especially in this moment when like the crypto bubble is collapsing too, like there's so many things that the SEC should be doing, should be looking at, should be taking action on. And, you know, it's like they occasionally talk about like, we're going to start enforcing things soon or we're going to start stepping things up. And every time Elon Musk does something, people are like, where are you, the SEC? And the other day he sent a tweet where, I don't know, he was discussing something.

And he was like, hey, SEC is anyone like alive over there or whatever. And like, you know, he knows that he can do whatever he wants, right? Like he can get away with virtually anything because nobody will hold him to account and particularly the SEC because he's already basically beat them before. Like, you know, a number of years ago, I think it was 2018 with the whole funding secured tweet. Like they did come to an agreement then, but he didn't even like follow the terms of the agreement and he was never really held to account for that because he was supposed to get lawyers to like review his tweets and stuff and he never really did that. Like that's a load of bullshit. And so, you know, he knows that nobody will hold him to account. So he just does whatever he wants, says whatever he wants.

And that causes serious problems. Yeah. And it's like, what I see here as well, it's like, it's, it's, this is feels to me like much more of a ratification of what the SEC was already doing. They were just like, look, let's stop even pretending to have slaps on the wrist. The wrist slapping, honestly, it's an inconvenience for all of us. Let's just do away with it and allow, allow the like, you know, the naked brutality of capitalism and it's sort of most, let's say it's most inwardly turned stage. Let's just allow that to run rampant up and down the country. Let's see you bring that to a jury trial and, you know, wait five years for anything to happen.

Yeah. And like, you know, the other thing there, too, is I was talking to Bennett Tomlin the other day, who's like a prominent crypto critic, right? And he was saying he was talking to someone at the SEC who used to head up its like internet enforcement division. And back in the day, like they used to prosecute so many different like internet scams, like, you know, just fake shit that people were doing to try to get money off of people online. And he was saying that like the SEC basically has no desire to do that now. Like they've taken on Floyd Mayweather and a couple other people who ran crypto scams. But like the number of scams being run online, particularly in the crypto industry, but not just the crypto industry is like huge. And they just like don't care anymore.

Like they're just not focused. It's just yet another thing that they have given up on trying to like protect people from. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's it's sort of like that's why I think of it as like suicidal in a governmental sense is there's a retreat from governance. The SEC has mental health. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And much like me, it's going to be staying at home and not doing anything. So like, I mean, as you say, like people think about Elon Musk, people think about like antitrust and stuff, but the SEC does a shitload of what you might call more minor securities and exchange enforcement that.

Not anymore. Well, yes, exactly. But that is genuinely quite important to having a society that works and you aren't getting like scam texts every five minutes. Honestly, I think it's like, no, that I think I get the great big, the big other has looked down at the U.S. and been like, oh, well, it's all Ponzi's now sort of a lot of the growth is coming from various Ponzi schemes, whether you call them unprofitable tech companies that will be profitable tomorrow or, you know, the various stable coins or whatever. So fuck it. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing, right? It's another one of those examples of Republicans being able to do something that Democrats can't, which is follow through a multi-generational political project.

In this case, I think it was Grover Norquist who said that his sort of ideal form of government was to reduce the federal government to the size of a spider and then drown it in the bathtub. Congratulations. That was it. Yeah, and that was in the 80s. So, you know, this is something that's required multiple generations of these freaks to do and they've done it. And just so you know, right? This litigation was brought by like a right-wing litigation shop. Yes, of course.

It was brought by like a litigation version of fucking Alec. The investment advisor in this case is a Patriot 28 LLC. So that's in the court filing, you know? Yeah. It's Jacozy SL on the owl as Patriot 28. And the last couple of things before we move on, right, is that I did pull this from a recent JP Morgan strategy publication. They said, last week's risk off in traditional financial markets, meaning selling shit, appeared at least in part to reflect the possibility of spillover effects from the route in a corner of the algorithmic stable coin market. So, perfect.

Excellent time to be getting rid of the only thing that can in theory prevent that from happening. I've got this JP Morgan dispatch here that says, a little worried about my Jenga towel, guys. Look, I've removed all the bits from the bottom. It somehow is still staying up. I'm concerned. But you know what it is? You know what it really is? We'll move on after this.

It's that the U.S. has for decades imposed this exact system, which is a fully empowered group of death squads in the form of ice in this case, and then a completely disempowered state economic oversight regulator or taxation, whatever. The U.S. and Britain as well have exported that to every country they go exploit, and now they're doing it to our fucking cell. Yeah, this is exactly the sort of civil affairs playbook from Iraq. Pakistan's anatomy of fascism is like colonial violence returning to the imperial core. It's happening again. So, I'm looking forward to the Sunni militias awakening in America's fractious Al Anbar province, and then whatever happens after that. Yeah, absolutely. Perfect.

All good, I imagine. Probably. Yeah, pretty fine. Every day we get closer to looking over the river and wondering if the horse riders from the next town over are eyeing up your generator. The thing about out of work SEC guys is that they're all actually like bathists and you can't really debathify them. So, you know, that's going to be a problem later on. You just, you know what we could do? We could have like with the administrative central version of the SEC falling apart, we could replace it with like a conditieri version.

Where like there will be cadres of financial inspectors that you could hide. Yeah, sure. You just buy off your auditor, sure. No, no, no. I'm thinking much more of like. You hire a company of SEC guys to come and audit your opponents. Yeah, absolutely. Like you get like whatever the 21st century version of John Hawkwood is to like, you know, ride into your opponents and cook their books.

Yeah, I'm a freelance. I'm a private SEC contractor. But I want to talk about, it's time to talk about automobiles. No, sorry, not time to talk about automobiles. It's time to discuss automobiles. We're going to conversate. Yeah. So, before we start in on the content of your book, Paris, just as a little amuse-bouche, I want to know, have you all seen the app, the proposed Apple car?

Yes. Oh yeah, the car that looks like a mouse. The magic mouse car. Absolutely. They're slicing up iPads like sheet cake over there because it looks like a big iPad with a wheel stuck to the bottom of it. I was like, my initial question I saw it was like, do you have to like flip it over to charge it? Absolutely. Absolutely.

Which is what you have to do with the Apple like mouse. Hmm. You have to flip it over or like you have to kneel down and like shimmy under your car to like plug something in to the bottom. It'll be very, it'll be like the most accessible way of owning a car. When the car like, does it just randomly start playing U2? We've preloaded U2 into your car. Not the songs, the actual band. That's right.

They're going to, Bono will be driving you and telling you about the world. I didn't think this was a possible sentence for me to say, but it looks like a worse Cybertruck. Yeah. I thought it did look similar to that actually. I love that all of these designs are converging on a point. But no, so the car itself, it says, it's a patent that's been filed for a car. I mean, it's not going to be the final car design, hopefully, but the patent basically suggests their direction of thinking, the stuff that they want to like get out ahead of and make sure nobody else makes a quote,

a car with no windows that instead works on VR technology. Great. Because the problem is, right, with a window, it's just you, clear glass, and then outside. And, you know, while it will never break down, it's also not cool. Yeah. So, you know, I rather... This is a huge boon for the startup we talked about a while ago with the windows that tell you what the weather's like outside. Why look around at the outside when you can like look at the metaverse and do that instead.

Yeah. What if the pedestrian bouncing off of the hood had a fun little like avatar face? So, let me tell you a little bit about what exactly they've patented. Of course, it is a... Like fucking Tiroland, but for vehicular manslaughter. It's a self-driving car that is so self-driving. It doesn't even have controls inside at all. Google tried that like five or six years ago and then was like, oh yeah, this doesn't work, actually.

Self-driving brackets, real, final, underscore, final, last brackets, real, zero, one, dot PSD. Yeah. Underscore TA. Yeah. But the idea is like, oh, we're going to... We can reduce... And I think this is a perfect example of technological solutionism, a concept you talk about in the book, Paris. But they said, well, we could reduce motion sickness by replacing conventional windows with an array of sensors and VR headsets.

I don't believe that at all. Like, I feel like that would make me more motion sick. Like, if I can't see what's happening and just like feeling these random, I don't know, changes in speed and whatnot all the time. I don't know. It's so ominous, because a VR headset is already the most bank-sified sort of like, oh, the future is bad kind of technology. And the last thing that would make me feel better is like, I can't even be like, are you feeling sick? Here, put these horse blinders up. I also don't believe that they're actually making a car.

I feel like we've been hearing this for 10 years and it's always a year or two away and it never arrives. And then we get more renderings and more whispers from Apple's shut down campus where no one can talk about anything. And it's like, I'm fed up with hearing about the Apple Car. I don't care. Well, they've lost the... I can't believe the Apple Car lost the tech won't save us endorsement. This is a perfect example of an insane idea that will never work, but that they're taking a punt on because if there's going to be a disruption in mobility, it is the most sort of wealthiest and powerful companies that want to be shaping what it is and what the physical world we live in looks like.

So there's a quote that you use from Thomas Friedman. So you know it's going to be genius in your book to sort of illustrate. This is the real threat of self-driving cars. Thomas Friedman won't have anyone to talk to to learn about a country. The quote used from Thomas Friedman that I'm going to sort of open this segment formally with is he says, I do not believe that this is a problem that's going to be solved by regulators and bureaucrats. This is a problem that's going to be solved by engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs. So can you tell me a little bit about what the engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs are trying to do?

And then we're going to talk a little bit about what they have done. Yeah, absolutely. Like the quote itself comes from this movie, this documentary Return of the Electric Car, I think it's called. Night of the Living Electric Car. Yeah, it's basically like looking at these four companies, including Elon Musk, Tesla that are like making electric cars and how this is going to be the future and like solve all of our problems. And it's a sequel to this movie who killed the electric car where the electric vehicle is like set up as something that is going to solve like these environmental problems by reducing transport emissions. But also because it came out right in the aftermath of like the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War, it was about how electric cars will also reduce our dependence on like fossil fuels, right? And so we won't need to be launching these wars in the Middle East.

And then the second movie comes along and like all that is gone. And it's just about cars and like cool cars and like, especially how Elon Musk is like adding the tech spin to cars and this is going to be the future, right? It's like our podcast after Corbin lost. We just dust ourselves off and we're like, oh, we just don't talk about that bit anymore. Yeah. After who did what? I've never heard about it. So no.

So no. So this is what we, this is where we're sitting, right? Is this, I like to think all of these problems that have been caused by car based infrastructure. We're saying the solution is more and more engineered car based infrastructure, essentially. Absolutely. It's basically like, look, we have these problems with emissions from cars. Okay, we'll have electric cars and they'll get rid of the emissions. Oh, we have problems with cars killing like a ton of people.

Okay, well, we'll just have self driving cars. So then they won't kill people because they're computers. So why would, why would computers kill people? And, you know, we're all stuck in traffic and that's because we can't figure out how to drive because, you know, we're humans. We're stupid. And so the computers, they can drive better. And so they won't have traffic when they take over. And it's so like all of these problems are treated as though they're not like inherent to a system of automobility.

They're just because like humans are in cars or because we use gas instead of electricity. And so if we can just make these like small technical tweaks to the automobile, then all of a sudden everything is fine. We don't need to really change anything like structural or substantive because we've fixed our cars and now like we can have this great future. And what if we were full in the car? Yeah, I feel like like the Friedman quote there is basically when we talk about regulators and bureaucrats, we're talking about changing the rules, the way that we move by taming the forces of capital that are trying to. Yeah, exactly. And he says, no, no, no, no, no.

We're absolutely not interested in that. Me specifically, because then I'll never get to talk to a taxi driver again. I'll never get to see the movie Taxi Driver. I'd love if Thomas Friedman watched the movie Taxi Driver. And just so people in New York are like, huh? Yeah. He asked if I was looking at him. Anyway, so this is a...

He says this is a problem for engineers, innovators and entrepreneurs. He's basically saying, no, no, this is... We are going to just continue forward more and faster, basically. We're going to get the car scene from Minority of Mort, which is cool. Friedman's futurist is a weird fucking arc for him to take. He's tucking into a big place of like metal spaghetti. I think he'd love it. I think he'd be like eating a soup made of like motor oil

with like torn up pages of modernist poetry in it. And he'd be like, mm, delicious. So interesting. I love this restaurant. All of the waiters keep dancing up to me and telling me I'm doomed. So let's talk about a little car company that was sort of exploded onto the scene at the close of the century that had an enormous stock overvaluation that was run by a charismatic, some think grifter,

and that despite being repeatedly rinsed in the press, turned out had ambitions to cover the entire country in its various automated infrastructure. And who's CEO was given to some unwise posts also. Spousing some reactionary social views. Yeah. Now, Paris, what company am I talking about? So you might think that we're talking about Tesla. But one of the things that I found absolutely fascinating

when I was doing the research for the book was that around the turn of the 20th century, I think you'd say, yeah, there was another electric car company because electric cars, of course, are not new. They were first experimented with in the 1830s, like electric mobility. And by the end of the 19th century, there were electric cars on the streets in Europe and the United States, just obviously not in the numbers that we would see cars today. And so there was this company called the Electric Vehicle Company. I learned about this from reading David Kirsch's book,

The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History. And like it sounds so much like a kind of a mix of Tesla and Uber in a way. So it was like making the electric cars. But it also wanted to control the transportation in all of these cities that it was expanding to really quickly in like the late 1890s. And so it was making the electric cars. It had like a taxi-like service. It had electric buses.

It had electric street cars. It was even making the power to power these electric vehicles. And so it really had its eyes set on like domination and used like kind of novel ways of financial engineering and stock-jobbing to get the money to fund this expansion. But then very quickly by like the right around like the late 1899, early 1990, that starts to collapse this like expansive vision that they had for like controlling all of this transportation. And then by like a few years later, they're just operating in New York City

and run until about 1912 before shutting down. And so I thought it was so fascinating because like, you know, we have all these narratives of like disruption and how these tech companies need to like expand so quickly and take over these markets. And then to look back at like 100 years ago, 120 years ago, and see that like there was something so similar going on then with an electric vehicle company that was like, you know, trying to stop its workers from unionizing using weird financial,

you know, manipulation tactics to get money. And I was like, holy shit, like it's like Tesla, but 120 years ago. I hate when time is a flat circle. What are my least favorite shapes for time to be in? Personally, I liked that they were constantly rinsed in a magazine called Forcedless Age. Yeah, that's a TF of the past right there. Well, no, it'd be in past TF.

What we would be is we would be interviewing past Paris and we would be I guess your name would be like Lil or something. And then we would be talking about, no, this isn't Horseless Age. This is a lack of equine era. Yeah, of course. Part of our two episodes special, lack of equine, equine, equine, no equine era. No, so this is, I think it just goes to show, right,

that the ambitions to do this have been around for a long time. It's fascinating, too, because like Silicon Valley, like has this very kind of narrow perception of history. Like they don't like to talk about history except for like a very narrow history that serves themselves, right? And so if you think about like the tech industry, you'll go back to like the internet. You'll know a little bit about like Apple in the 70s.

And like other than that, that doesn't really fit into Silicon Valley's narrative. But then when you start to actually look at the history of like so many of these technologies, all of the things that they're talking about are like not very novel. And you see like these repetitions, like time and time again, where these technologies are supposed to take off and then don't, and then supposed to take off and then don't. And so like this example is just like another one of those where,

you know, electric vehicles were supposed to do this, companies were acting in this way. And like it just shows that so many of the things that Silicon Valley pretends is novel about right now and what they're doing, like really isn't at all. It seems like, yeah, it seems like we're stuck in these same repeating loops. Interesting. If only there was a movie about this.

So you talk about, and you open your book, the discussion of the 1939-1940 World's Fair and Norman Belgetty's exhibition, Shell presents the city of tomorrow. The Shell one came before actually. So yeah, the one he designed at the World Fair was for General Motors. And so this is less like vision of how, you know, automobility is going to be like the future. This is like 20 or 30 years on.

Everyone's going to have these automobiles. There's going to be these really wide roads in the city and people are going to be in these like tall, high-rise towers. And then you'll be able to drive out of the city into like the more rural areas where there will be like more homes around. And the highways will actually drive your car for you. You won't have to steer it yourself because there'll be stuff in the highways that'll do it for you.

And so it really was this vision of like, you know, right now, like things are not great. You know, you're coming out of the Great Depression. Like things are, people aren't super rich and whatnot. And so it's presenting this future of like technological kind of abundance because you also have like the idea of like the suburban home. You also have the idea of like the mass consumerism. And the idea is that, as you say, we're presented in this vision

of the World's Fair and what this future was going to be by GM. We're earlier developed by Norman Belgettys in the shell vision of the future that he put together before that. And so like all of these things are connected. And then later, this kind of vision inspires some of the legislation by like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his transportation policies and things like that as they start to shape like what this automotive future is going to look like.

Well, it's almost like this discussion with how much of like the metaverse or whatever is influenced by books such as Snow Crash. It's this example of how whether or not you're doing science fiction as a company trying to sell it as not fiction or science fiction just as an author that these ideas have these really long half lives and can really root in the brains of powerful people.

And I think this concept of the technological abundance but read as a perfectly atomizing force, like we have such technological abundance that you're never going to have to see another person, basically. It's also interesting because like the vision of the future you see there like so many others, like there are these aspects of it that seem like they would be okay, right? Like the roads are so large, like you won't be stuck in traffic

because there's so much space for people. Like, you know, the idea that you get stuck like what? No, that's not part of it. And there would be pedestrian infrastructure. So like, yes, there'd be these big roads but there'd be separate pedestrian infrastructure. So you wouldn't need to worry about being hit by a car because you'd be separated from it

and you'd have other ways to get around. And of course, the reality of what that turns into is like so much of the city being, especially in the United States being like bulldozed for parking and roads, the pedestrian infrastructure never actually gets constructed. And, you know, you just have this like terrible future of everyone driving these cars, everyone being stuck in traffic

but those things don't make it into the future because they don't sound very great. And so then like, I think that that gives you a way of like thinking about all of the futures that the tech industry or these companies try to present us because they'll always kind of provide a more rosy picture than what actually gets delivered. And they'll never really think of the downsides

of these futures that they're presenting and that serve their bottom lines. Because this vision was presented in the aftermath of an enormous public battle between ordinary people and then car companies and car users, where I get you quote this in the book, that the number of people killed by cars was a scandal to the point where cars were depicted as a modern molok

and child sacrifice. Yeah, like the kind of like we imagine now when we look back, we're like, okay, the car is like normalized, right? It's everywhere, especially in North America. And the idea that we would like challenge its position can seem kind of crazy to some people, right? But when you look back to the early 1900s, the car is just being rolled out.

And so it's not normalized. Like people walk, people bike, people take the streetcar, people occasionally take like a horse-drawn carriage, especially if you're rich, maybe. But like people having these individual vehicles is very novel. And when they arrive on the road, the really big change is that they can drive much faster

than other things that are available, right? And so they start killing a lot more people. The first one recorded in New York City is in 1899. But that, you know, traffic death rate starts to increase. And it particularly affects children who used to play in the streets before there was this risk of automobiles killing them and young women. And so that, because it's like these people

who are particularly vulnerable, it creates this backlash to the automobile in some sectors of the population and whatnot. And so like, you know, they do funeral marches like in the streets to draw attention to people who are dying from cars. They put up statues to people who died from cars. They ring church bells when people die from cars

to draw attention to it. And they have this like really evocative propaganda like the modern Molek or, you know, these posters that say like the car is killing children's fathers, daddy didn't come home, like all this kind of stuff to draw attention to how the car is like killing so many people and shouldn't be allowed to like take over the street, should be regulated, should be reigned in.

But obviously there are more powerful forces at play. And if you want to think about what's happening now in Britain, and I think in the States as well, is that now the demand from drivers is that they should be allowed to kill protesters if they come into the road. This has been a longstanding demand from British conservatives, is that if someone protests in front of your car, it's a legal kill.

Yeah, because they might have to go to the hospital and they might have to go like take their kids to school in spite of the fact that they don't have to go to the hospital and they don't have to take their kids to school, because they might have to do that. Because there's a chance that like hypothetically in a different universe, you might have to do that. It's completely fine to hurt process.

I have like not, I don't want to like obviously dwell too much on to this, but I did see a real life incident of this happen the other day when unfortunately I live in a place where like I have to drive because there's not really any other alternative. So I was like on the road and it was like quite busy during sort of like a peak period. So it's like that time we were supposed to go slow, right? I went slow, I went past like the barrier and everything.

When the car behind me was not going slow at all, he was like honking at me actually because he felt I was going too slow. Anyway, he like hit a cyclist and I sort of saw this happen in real time and like it is genuinely like one of the most horrifying things to like see like someone like a person like get hit by a car. And thankfully like the cyclist like didn't kind of like

have any life running injuries, but the guy gets out of the car and Ben like while the cyclist is on the floor is like shouting at him because and he's like talking about like, oh, I needed to get into my parking space. I didn't like hit the whole thing, but it was like this very kind of like distilled example of like how like roads and especially like particular conditions on roads also kind of shapes the people who like drive cars and like those shapes

and kind of like entitlement around it, which I definitely kind of see when people talk about both like the like the motorist as like an identity, but like also the electric motorist is kind of emerging as this like different type of like it's the worst parts of motor like motorist identity and the worst part of like tech guy identity. That's like, there's an expectation there, right?

Like why shouldn't you be allowed to kill someone with your car or if like you basically are for anything else? Like if someone gets in gets in your way, like I'm sure it's an accident or whatever, but if you're not drunk and you're not on your phone or whatever, then, you know, you kind of like societally chalk that up to bad luck rather than anything that needs regulating.

And it's just sort of like a natural occurrence almost by that point. Yeah. And you know, I think we like downplay the like wider consequences of that, like people being like, you know, I think we tend to look at death figures from automobiles and like in a lot of Western countries, they are comparatively low.

Like in the United States, they've actually been rising like significantly in recent years. Just the other day, the safety regulator said that like almost 43,000 people were killed on US roads last year, which was a 10% increase from the year before, which was also like a record number. So like it's wild how it's increasing over there in a lot of Western countries.

Driving still the most dangerous thing most people do every day, right? Totally. And like in the States, like, you know, we hear so much about gun violence over there, but cars kill more people than guns, but you don't hear anything about like really doing anything about that.

But then we also like underestimate the effects of just people getting hit by cars who like have that trauma, like that that continues. But also the people who get injured and seriously injured by cars, which was many more than the number of people who actually die. And we just downplay that because the car is so normalized and like the idea that we should take it on

or we should try to change these things is just unimaginable to so many people. Like it's almost like how we're seeing the normalization of COVID in real time. And like then to think back about like how traffic deaths were normalized over the course of like a number of years and decades and whatnot. I think it's just like interesting to reflect on like how

our society like normalizes harm. We could we could become very smart, right? And do do a huge number of like we could sell a huge number of books if any of us could think of a sort of an inverse of horontology for what it feels like to to live in the aftermath of a lost campaign like that. Yeah. So if you are that person, write that book, pitch it to

Tversa or a piece of paper. Pitch it to us. No, no. Tell us your idea. Send us the manuscript and then don't worry about it. Don't worry. Yeah, don't worry. Send us the manuscript and just walk away.

Yeah. If you're about to develop a new theory of zemiology for our benighted left of stage, then yeah, go ahead and give it to us. We'll take good care of it. It'll be here when you get back in like an hour. Just go for a walk around the block. It's fine.

Also, by coincidence, we're writing a book that may end up being similar. Yeah. But don't start it now. It'll be different. It'll be different. We actually started it before we started talking about this. Yeah.

So actually, yeah. Anyway, so the other thing I want to mention here as well is like there has been examples of popular resistance to and actually some of that popular resistance to these divisions working. And the case where it worked at least had limited success was in London in the 1970s. Yeah.

When people stopped London in the 70s from turning into Glasgow in the 70s. Yeah. Well, effectively, right? There was this. You're not even joking. The Glasgow plan for like slum clearance and putting most ways ran a big sort of like effectively impossible most

away directly north to south through the centre of Glasgow. Who would want to pass from East to West Glasgow? Nobody. Nobody wants to walk around. And what you would do instead is you would get on the ring road, the most way that's going to be built all around it. But that part was abandoned. Okay.

So we just, we cut the city in half and then forgot to do the thing, forgot to complete the job. Yes. What Glasgow did was we accidentally gave ourselves a car moat. So in London in 1973, what it was, they wanted to essentially demolish much of central London like Covent Garden, Greenwich.

They wanted to put a ring road, like a highway around the square mile, which is almost so, so just small circle of highway. That's a roundabout by this point. Yeah. That's a NASCAR track. Same speeds. Yeah.

Absolutely. But again, it was this, these utopian, almost reactionary modernist who wanted to create these perfect separations of people from cars and all this. And so the example was, and they wanted to, again, rebuild London, tear down Soho, fucking pave over, make Hyde Park into a fucking parking lot. Critical support for that.

Yeah, I was about to say. And again, one of the main reasons it failed was that all the people they were trying to fuck with were wealthy. Well, that's, I mean, exactly the same with the growth of the underground and trains in London. So yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. Well, again, that's a vast oversimplification, right?

It's that, for example, there was a similar proposal in Paris, though, like Le Corbusier, who's this like modernist planner wanted to do the same thing. I'm not letting him get away with his fucking Nazi collaborating ass. But yeah, he basically had this plan to like demolish Paris and rebuild it as these like high rises with massive roads in between them.

What about what if ugly housemen? Yeah. What are we going to do? Housemen, but pebble dash. It's going to be great. No, so but this London plan, right? Again, it was so fiercely opposed by the people who lived in Covent Garden, which was sort of shabby at the time,

but sort of up and coming, but also in Notting Hill, which wasn't, right? Michael Hesteltein was encountered, you know, with huge amounts of abuse from people in Notting Hill in 1970. That's good. Absolutely. And but like they were closed.

They were demolishing houses. They were closing shops. Anything that they had to do to make room for more traffic, because the only way that they could envision a future of these cities, which were all in pretty dire straits in 1970s, was the this grand utopian transformation centered around the car. And again, with no small amount of encouragement from people

like Shell City of the Future. And there is an example in Scotland where one city completed the entire thing with the walkways and the public buildings and stuff. Is it Cumbernaught? Yes, it is. It's Cumbernaught. That's the only one that ever did it.

A city on the grow. It's famously not very nice. They're having to rip a bunch of it out because of how terrible it is. There was a lot of that happening in the 70s though, right? Because a lot of Europe didn't really do the automotive transition until post-war, right?

Or that's when the real push was on, whereas the United States started earlier. And then especially when you get into the 70s and you see this in particular in places like the Netherlands and Denmark and whatnot. When you start to have the energy crises, there is this major opposition to the imposition of automobility and putting parking lots everywhere, tearing stuff down

for roads and highways. And they start to have this more of a transition toward the bike and the bike becomes more popular. And that's not to say that the Netherlands and Denmark don't have suburbs and car-oriented suburbs and stuff too. But there's more of an opposition to it. They used to look like here.

Yeah. If you see photos of Amsterdam in the 60s, very, very similar to the traffic layout of any modern British city. Exactly. And there was a mass retreat from that stuff. Not just in Amsterdam. It happened a lot in the Nordic countries too. A lot of this, we're talking about imagining the city,

but a lot of these visions of the future combined with intensive lobbying basically meant that the car companies were able to forestall the development of mass transit. They were able to make streetcars run much worse. They were able to get roads. We're talking about the streetcar scandal. Some of my favorite shit. Oh, your city has a functioning of slightly overbuilt

and inefficient network of light rail. We'll just eat that. The clearest example of American corporate conspiracy since the business plot against FDR. Forming into these obviously bad faith, evil corp-ass cabals to buy up all the streetcars and then scrap them. Yeah.

Yeah, it's wild. GM, Firestone, and the idea was they'd get rid of the streetcars. Then you'd have buses. So that would be your public transit instead. But then it's much easier to defund a bus line and cut transit services that way once the streetcars have already been taken away, right? And so then you have this even greater reliance on the automobile,

especially as people are pushed out to the suburbs and there's no real transit there anyway. Yeah. But I think what I'm sort of driving at with all of this is the way that things are... You're gonna bust to it instead. The awfulness with which things exist, I think, with to do with modability was not...

It didn't just happen. It was the result of a coherent, planned disruption by the automotive industry and their associated industries, the tire industry, right? Yeah, and which one? Because as you, the listener, are gonna write the greatest, sort of, leftist book of the 21st century about, we exist in this sort of state of failure.

Hmm. But that this is... All this to say that these were very contested. This was a battle and it was not simply as... As is presented by the technological solutionist of today, that your Teslas and your Ubers and your various... Misha Goss, that this is the inevitable next step. It may be the inevitable next step for them,

but it is hardly some kind of law of physics that horse goes to horseless, goes to self-driving horseless. Hmm. You know, and so I wanna talk about, like, especially how... Self-driving horseless age. I saw a horse, I did see a horse, because I live in a place where there are lots of horses.

I did see a horse tow a car the other day, so that's not entirely true. Yeah, well, hopefully in the future. Semi-horseless age. Semi-mostly horseless. But I think it's significant, right? Let's fast forward to 2009. I think it's significant that Tesla and Musk

burst into the public consciousness in 2009 when he launches the Tesla Roadster, right? Because just as the gleaming cities of the future are proposed in the aftermath of the Great Depression, so too is the thing that keeps you bought in, if you like. The promise of the better world through the entrepreneur and innovator, as opposed to the bureaucrat and the regulator, comes primarily through Elon Musk

and his basically circus sideshow of futurism, right? So, I want to talk about how the new generation sees its own mission of Automobility Disruption, Paris. Yeah, it's fascinating, right? Because Musk does have that moment where he is on all the covers of the magazines, like the media is giving him these glowing profiles. And the launch of the Roadster is a big part of that, along with SpaceX and being the guy who's going to bring us to Mars.

And I think it's important that that happens, like, in the aftermath of the recession, because obviously this is a moment when a lot of people are out of work, when there's also not a whole lot of, like, hope for the future, because we're just after going through this, like, terrible economic crash, but also, like, neoliberalism isn't offering very many solutions or much hope to very many people. And so the tech industry, and Elon Musk is one of the major figures of that,

steps into that void and presents the future. And so his future is electric cars will save us from climate change, and we're all going to, like, go live on Mars in the future. And so he gets positioned as, like, the visionary for that. And I think it's really interesting then to look back and, like, look at Tesla and the car company and how much it struggled to get off the ground in that moment, how it was basically saved by the U.S. government

with its loans in the aftermath of the recession. The one that's always focused on is Selindra, that, like, the Obama administration gave a loan to this solar company that the Republicans were always, like, you know, you wasted our money because this company collapsed. But from the same program, Tesla also got, like, hundreds of millions of dollars, and they never talk about that piece of it, which I think is really interesting.

But yeah, so there's this moment where the tech industry is positioned as, like, it is going to save the American economy, if not the world economy. And so their visions of the future are what need to be embraced and, like, not just embraced, but, like, held up as, like, this is amazing. There's nothing wrong with it. And we kind of see that in, like, the embrace of the gig economy, the embrace of Elon Musk's vision of the electric car and so many others. And it's only, like, you know, later, around 2015-16,

when we start to finally reassess these things and say, oh, maybe we shouldn't have just, like, accepted everything that the tech industry told us, and we should actually be critically, like, analyzing these ideas, both for, like, the broader society, but particularly for cities and mobility, which Elon and these other companies are selling us. And we talk about, right, some of the examples of how the car companies, in the original battle for the streets of sort of, of the world, they sort of did things like they received and they got themselves enormous subsidies,

but also they kind of just invented whole cloth, this idea of jaywalking, that people who walked into the street are rubes, that they deserve what they get, and so on. Not just rubes, but criminals. Yeah. And you quote this in, you note this in your book, in fact, sort of some of the, like, Google's head of AI, Andrew Ng, said, look, it might, at some point, it might be necessary to quote train road users to anticipate self-driving behavior, which just sounds like inventing jaywalking again.

Like, oh, he wasn't wearing a reflective vest, he must have wanted to get killed. It's fascinating, right, because we were sold this vision, like, earlier in the 2010s, that, like, self-driving cars were going to be everywhere in a few years, we're going to take over everything, solve all, like, the problems that we have with automobility, traffic, road deaths, all these things. And then, especially in 2018, when the Uber crash happens and it kills the pedestrian in Arizona, there's finally this reassessment, like, oh, they lied to us, the technology actually can't do that, and its applications are going to be much more limited, like, a kind of fancy system

that maybe you drive a little bit better, but that you need to keep paying attention to. And so, but there are still these people who want this vision of computers driving the cars to be realized, and you start to get these statements from them about, like, okay, we need to start changing pedestrian behavior, we will need to remake the roads so that they work for self-driving vehicles. A self-driving car cannot fail, it can only be failed. Yeah, exactly. It can only be splattered upon, yeah. But yeah, so, you know, you have these visions of this, like, future, that technology is going to be able to deliver it to us,

and in all these instances, like, it doesn't really work out, like, the self-driving car, it hasn't really worked out, yes, we're seeing a few more of them, like, on the streets now in some cities, but the idea that it's going to completely replace human driving and this is going to be the way that we get around, like, really isn't going to be realized, we need a different vision for mobility, but it delayed us having that conversation by a decade, and even the electric car, like, yes, electrification is going to be important to addressing the, like, climate impacts, the environmental impacts of transportation and of automobility, but the idea that just replacing our entire system of automobility,

every automobile that's on the road with an electric version, and that solves climate change or transportation's contribution to it, like, is just not the reality, it's better, yes, but there are still a lot of consequences to that, that we are going to have to deal with if we actually take that route, which is the route that Tesla and that many car companies are trying to steer us down right now. Because it comes back to, it comes back to looking at all the problems created by the sort of, you know, internal combustion engine car, one we've sort of talked about, sort of at length this episode, and saying, well, the problem is just that the cars aren't good enough,

that the cars need to be improved, we need to make the cars smarter, we need to make driving less unpleasant, and we need to make, but that means, right, that we're going to have to crunch the world in this procrustian bed to fit our model. It's like, okay, well, I guess city streets are going to have to all be pretty straight then, you can't have sort of the weird jog that you have at Yonge Street, you're going to have to, it's a little Canada stuff for listeners out there, but we're not going to be able to have the European city streets, that's not going to work, so we're going to have to either, you know, you're going to get left behind,

and you're not going to get the future, or you're going to have to basically crunch your life into the shape that the AI can process easily, which to me sounds not desirable. No, there's a VW executive who like after the Uber incident in 2018, I believe, I can't remember if he said it in 2018 or 2019, but he was basically saying that like, if self-driving cars happen, they're not going to be like the level five where they can do everything, and they're only going to work in cities that have like perfect road infrastructure, good weather, and like HD maps of every part of the city,

so the self-driving car like knows what's happened, that are constantly being updated. Yeah, and so it's like, okay, so which cities? Yeah, exactly. It's very much an example of works in theory. Yeah, we're all communists, so who doesn't love theory? I only really like sort of like had one kind of question, and I guess it's sort of related to a point that was just made about how, like the effects of kind of even with like companies like Uber and like all these other kind of, you know, rideshare companies,

how they've kind of really shaped the way that people actually live in cities, and the decisions that they make and crucially like how people kind of like organize their lives, and I was just thinking about this in relation to like a new story that came out I think this week, about how Uber or like Lyft like fares are not really any more different now to like black cab fares, but like there's sort of like legacy of this organization was that through like, all of this company was that because of like the fact that it was able to proliferate with access to cheap credit, it kind of, it sort of made like so much of city living impossible, right? So like, you know, because of the number of like cars, it means that like buses are late,

and it kind of has an impact on like train times, and it has like just kind of like functioning. It's self from working last of all, but now you can't get an Uber. Well, like I also remember like back in the days when everyone was sort of talking about how great Uber was, like one of the arguments was like, oh, it makes like living in a city so much more efficient, and it means that like, you know, the way that you can actually experience a city is like completely different because of like the access to like cheap rides, which is all just like this fast, but I kind of wonder whether like we're sort of seeing this play out in a longer scale with self driving cars, but even if they like, they don't like, and they won't materialize to the scale that like, you know,

the kind of like advocates are saying they are, but because of like their power and crucially because they seem to posit the only kind of like future of what a city looks like to, like, you know, council plan, like city planners and government and everything, that what we'll eventually see is a type of like enforced city living that works in the basis of like, imagine if we had all these like self driving cars, so you have to kind of like adapt your life towards that, only to find that like this promise is not delivered. So then you end up having a city that where you end up having cities that are like even more dysfunctional than they already were. Yeah, self driving car city where everyone walks.

But no, I completely agree with that, right? Like I think in so many of the instances, we see all these like promises of what these companies are supposed to deliver, these technologies are supposed to deliver. And then they don't do that. And there are a lot of problems that are created as a result like Uber causing a ton of traffic or self driving cars have been used in the United States to argue against referendums that would have given more money to transit agencies to like expand their services and build new transit services. And even when you look at Elon Musk, it was really interesting in one of the biographies that were written about him. He admitted that his whole plan for the hyperloop that he put out like in the early 2010s was designed to ensure that California had trouble building its high speed rail system

and would hopefully cancel it because he didn't want that to get built because he didn't believe that like high speed rail was a good thing. And so like it's just fascinating how I think so many of these visions of the future are false, are self serving to many of these tech companies and many of these companies generally, but also delay like the conversations that need to be had to actually solve the problems that they pretend that they're actually going to solve through technology. So we on the show we refer to this of course as the wizard will do it theory of technology and it's so pervasive because if you're a government, if you're a government who mainly sort of either ran on or ran in a system where a good government is conceived as not governing and doing very little, then if someone tells you that they have some magic beans that will solve your problem that would otherwise require governing or doing something or spending money or spending some kind of effort, then great, that's exactly what you want to hear. You know, someone said, don't worry, I actually, I have a teleporter. I'm just going to tell you that it works. Legally, you have to believe me and you know what, it's great for you because you get to say we're going to do a teleporter and it's going to cost us a tenner.

Yeah, and that's kind of the story of like Elon Musk boring company, right? Like whenever he talks to cities about it, like it acts as their way to say that we're going to do something on transit or trains but not actually do anything. There's a really funny example. And it's the famous guy. The famous guy is going to do it. He was warrior on SNL. He's going to come in and do the tunnels. You don't have to have buses. Remember Grimes's ex? He's going to come in and do the buses for us. You've seen him on Twitter. He posted an epic meme. There's this example in Florida. I think it's in Fort Lauderdale but it could be another municipality there. But they wanted to build a new tunnel for the train that had to like cross this river or something because the old one was like falling apart, not working anymore. And so they approached Elon Musk boring company to do it. And at the end of the agreement, they agreed not to build the tunnel for the train but to build a tunnel for Tesla cars that would go to the beach.

And so that's what came out of it. How do you go into that negotiation and get rinsed that hard? And that's the other thing. The boring company comes in on these discussions where another thing to say as well, we've always imagined cities in 2D. We have to imagine them in 3D because people live in these big towers. That's 3D. You just live in a story of 2D. If you just live in a house that's like two or three stories but you have a flat like that's like a bungalow or whatever. That's not 3D. That's 2D. Even though it is 3D. We need to live in 3D for some reason. Because if you're going from the 50th floor of your apartment building to the 50th floor of your office tower, why do you have to go to the bottom? Why can't we just have levels of transportation at every floor? It sounds like I'm basically joking.

I love to fire myself into a pneumatic tube. It actually does sound kind of cool. I would like to do that. Perfect. We at Trebuchet have decided we're going to put one of our new high-tech installations at the top of every office building. Give me the future ArmaTubes. Give me that. That's fine. Let's talk a little bit about this idea that cities have to be in 3D. This thing that's talked about about Uber Elevate, which is vertical takeoff and landing electric taxis. Which has crashed and burned at this point. Uber it has, but the concept has not. They keep getting funded. Hopefully this tech downturn finally kills that too. Because if it ever gets off the ground in either the literal or figurative sense, it's going to have a body count that makes the car deaths look like a goddamn preschool.

Yeah, but then we're going to have to train birds out of J flying and it'll be fine. Any small thing goes wrong. It's like, what if you had the survival of just going out to a restaurant or whatever? You had the chance of coming home the same as the guys that went to get bin Laden. Not very good. It's called being a trans woman. What is this focus on 3D cities? It's interesting because their concept of 3D, which I believe this started with Elon Musk and then was adopted by Uber executives when they still had this Uber Elevate division that they've since sold off because they've realized it was bullshit or maybe they've realized I don't know. They've never spoken with anything else.

Yeah, I know. So the idea is that right now transportation is in 2D. It's just on the surface level because for some reason, subways and metro systems don't actually count as 3D in Elon Musk's mind because there's not enough layers of tunnels. And so we need because Elon Musk, like original proposal for the boring company was to build like 100 layers of tunnels under Los Angeles for cars. And that's just turned into like an amusement park ride in Las Vegas for Tesla owners now. But yeah, so the idea is that there's all this congestion because we only have roads on one level. And so now we need either a ton of tunnels under cities for cars to relieve traffic and congestion or we need flying cars that go above the city. And it's one of those two ways that we relieve traffic congestion because then that takes transportation from 2D on the road to 3D either below or above it.

And yeah, it's just like a load of bullshit. Sure, sure. But also don't forget rightly about the phenomenon we like to call induced demand where if you build a road, cars could sort of appear to fill it. Elon Musk told me that that is not real and I choose to believe him. Just one more lane, bro. One more lane and I swear I'll be good. It's funny because his like initial proposal for the boring company like before the boring company existed. His solution to traffic was double decker highways.

A lot of people forget that and then he realized that wasn't going to work because it's just a bullshit solution. And so then that is when tunnels appears and that becomes his big solution because double decker highways didn't. And of course now the one tunnel is open in a single lane tunnel and a group of up to four cars can go through it in one direction at once. Then you have to queue to use it. Yeah. And it's not even autonomous and you go like really slow. It's a joke. It's an amusement park ride with like flashy colors for the children who are Tesla owners.

And it's just these... And so like what you get is these high-minded concepts. Like, oh, it's the city in 3D that sounds great as a TED talk makes no sense if you think about it for more than a minute and then ends up creating a something that is worse than useless. But forestalls the development of anything potentially useful. And I think that the reason I wanted to speak for so long about the conditions of the original development of cars is that these are basically mirrored one for one. Each beat every single time from remaking the city to forestalling development to sucking up subsidies to trying to create even new social norms just to facilitate this frankly insane way of getting around. Utopia will not be achieved until we have built the city from Detective Pikachu. Which I think operates like that, funnily enough.

And you sort of say by way of conclusion in your book that really this is a gated, entirely gated, deeply unequal green-washed city with no pedestrians but enormous amounts of surveillance. Can you just go into a little bit of what that looks like before we close? Yeah, totally. And so that's kind of like, you know, looking at mobility but then also like zooming out to the other things that they're doing in the city, right? And so we have this like urban environment, suburban environment, city environment that has been built up over a number of decades that is based on the influence of real estate developers, automotive companies, etc, etc. To create an urban form that really serves their interest, I think above the interest of the public and the people who actually use it, right? And so now we are at a stage where the tech companies are like the new major forces that are trying to drive changes in the urban landscape to suit their business models and how they make money, right? And so, you know, what we essentially see is the increasing addition of so-called smart technologies into everything that we do.

It's all over your home. You know, we're surrounded by them. We're using wearables or supposed to, you know, with the way that they imagine things. There are the cars that are now filled with these devices, with technologies, with tracking connected to the internet. You know, Google and their smart city branches, but many other companies have these as well, are trying to expand the number of devices that are in the city itself. I think COVID really helped that. We see Amazon stores where, like, you know, supposedly you don't need to talk to a cashier, but you're like surveilled everywhere. Everything you do is tracked. And so the goal of these companies is really to create an urban environment where all of these technologies are around us, is presented to us as convenience. But, you know, it's a form of surveillance and it also creates these really worrying developments where they have control over what we can access, what we can do. And if we can see from the way that these algorithmic systems work right now, where they have trouble detecting certain people, particularly people of color, when we look at, like, what's happened with workplaces that have algorithmic management like Uber, someone can be shut off from their Uber account because they have a bad rating or because something is, like, perceived wrong by Uber the company,

and they have very little recourse to actually get their account restored or anything like that, right? And so I think we're moving into this space where more and more is controlled by these tech companies. There's technology built into more of our lives. It's presented as convenience, but this algorithmic control is actually incredibly dangerous and presents these, like, really unequal potential futures that just get, like, far worse than things are right now, and that really need to be opposed because, like, we need to stop buying into the lies that they're selling us about these, like, grand technological futures that never arrive but actually just make everything worse every single time. So I think the closing thought here is be like the residents of 1970s Notting Hill and you, Michael Heseltine, when he comes to try to make a smart road in your city. Yeah, because it's the same guys. It's still the same people sometimes. That's how quickly this has fucking happened. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's about it for today. So I want to say, Paris, it has been a delight to speak with you today. Great to speak with you as well. Great to come back on the show. You know, if anybody is interested in the book, they can go pre-order it from Verso or, like, anywhere else.

Call Road to Nowhere. What Silicon Valley gets wrong about the future of transportation. Thanks so much. And we will be linking that. And also, of course, don't forget to listen to the Tech Won't Save Us podcast, which Paris also hosts. And don't forget that we have a Patreon. It is $5 a month. There is a second episode a week, but with, like, Britnology. We invented that business model. Yeah, absolutely. With Britnology and some other projects that might be in the works. Yeah, perhaps if two of your friends were working on a project in the early stages. Yeah, if I don't know, if it was, you know, who would do that? Yeah, come on. I mean, what it would be? It would be kind of resuscitating elements of, like, some kind of a book club, but then adding some new elements. Who could say what it would be? I mean, what are things to suggest? Hey, you know what? I'll leave that to the big wigs in Congress. This has been part one of automobile conversation.

And don't forget part two, part two of automobile conversation is coming in a few days for that five bucks a month. So do check that out. In the meantime, we will see you in over on the other side of the parking structure for episode two of automobile conversation before we get back to normal TF. Bye, everyone. You